Photogenic suntans

Chapter 5 analyses perceptions by light therapists of the suntan (pigmentation) as the external sign of stored solar energy in the body, of the body visualised as literally ‘photogenic’ (light-generating). It does so by focusing specifically on advertisements using colour to convey the glowing tans and radiant smiles of healthy mothers, thriving babies and virile men, who consume light in the battle against ‘sun-starvation.’ Both sunlight and artificial light were directed onto mothers’ malfunctioning breasts to restore lactation, onto ‘backwards’ children to correct normal brain functioning, and onto injured soldiers to disinfect and heal their fetid battle wounds. In the regeneration of these highly-valued subjects, physicians and politicians alike perceived light as an aid to national salvation. Yet in encouraging citizens to emulate the dark skins of ‘primitive’ races, they conveyed ambivalent attitudes towards the merits of suntanned skin. This chapter investigates suntan as simultaneously a visual marker of recharged health and a troubling act of racial transgression during a period of heightened eugenic fervour in Britain and Europe.

Ultra-violet radiation puts up the general
resistance of the body to disease, and promotes good health and
sexual power of citizens who by sedentary indoor lives during the
winter have become depressed and out of condition […] Marasmic and
delicate children may be made better, and mothers who cannot nurse
their babies may be made more efficient. The general [carbon] arc
bath affords a natural, simple, and valuable stimulant of the health
functions of the body.1

(Leonard Hill, 1925)

Pigmentation is a sign that solar energy has been
transformed into human energy. The rays of the sun are very powerful
germicides. As the skin imbibes more of these rays, it stores up a
great deal of this germ-killing energy … [and] once pigmentation has
taken place, and a nice deep brown skin obtained, any length of
exposure can be endured without the slightest feeling of discomfort.
Also the body will have stored enough Solar energy … to fight
against any outside disease-bringing influence which may attack him.
Therefore, the first goal to be striven for by those who seek
regeneration from the sun is, pigmentation. After that, health will
come by leaps and bounds.2

(Victor Dane, 1929)

Jubilant
smiles and radiant tanned skin greet the viewer from a mother and child
gracing the cover of Hanovia’s 1940 ‘Homesun’ colour pamphlet (Plate 3). With all the warmth and intimacy of a
family snapshot taken on a summer’s day, the colour photograph skilfully
effaces its own careful construction: the precision of its retouching,
particularly on the fine hairs of both figures; the familial setting, so far
removed from the artifice of the studio; and the masterful capturing of the
direct gaze, relaxed pose, and rascally smile of a difficult photographic
subject, namely the toddler. Together these effects make for an image so
‘natural’ and informal as to seem suited equally to the family photo album
or to the mass-produced advertisement. As
the cover of a pamphlet catering to a middle-class British clientele, it
curiously communicates nothing about the actual product, the ‘Homesun’
mercury vapour lamp (Fig. 4.11). Instead, as with the
‘Vi-tan’ pamphlet cover we encountered in Chapter 4
(Plate 1), the image conflates natural and
artificial exposures, collapsing the distinction between experiences. These
include the different outputs of sunshine versus the mercury vapour bulb
(the latter considerably higher in ultraviolet radiation), the physical
spaces of dark interior versus sunlit exterior, as well as erasing the
technological mediation of goggles and electric components required for
artificial exposures. This is only further confounded by the caption and the
product name itself: ‘For health – fitness – beauty – Get back in the sun
with a “Homesun.”’

Turning the page, contemporary viewers saw this conflation
made in an even more overt, visual way (Plate 4). A
female sunbather at the beach is stripped, flipped, and transported to the
modern boudoir, exchanging the buzzing rays of a highly stylised orange sun
for the ruler-edged, white block projecting forth from the lamp’s curving,
shiny head. What remains of her beach fantasy, back in the drab grey tones
of her sophisticated urban dwelling, is colour: a saturated,
near-fluorescent orange that marks out the ultraviolet rays’ good effects in
the form of a radiant, glowing tan. It is the same orange colour coating the
skin of mother and baby, where it is further offset by the purplish-blues of
the mother’s flamboyant, floral patterned robe (Plate
3). Elsewhere in the pamphlet are many other partially coloured,
heavily retouched photographs, through which the highlighted tans of
‘Homesun’ users become more and more pronounced, if not outright alien (Plate 5).

This chapter is devoted to the subject of suntan
(pigmentation) and the social and political significance of the British
public’s avid consumption of ultraviolet radiation. There have been frequent
references to suntan throughout the book but here it takes centre stage, as
it does in the ‘Homesun’ pamphlet cover. I discussed suntan briefly in Chapter 2 as we waded through the varying, competing
definitions of solar erythema (often described as ‘sunburn’) among light
therapists and its ambivalent role in ‘dosing’ light. Suntan had its part to
play as well, some perceiving it a help, others a hindrance, in the healing
process. In order to understand the place of suntan in light therapy we must
explore how it was defined and conceptualised by physicians and popular
promoters, and furthermore how that information was disseminated into the
public domain. This is integral to comprehending its value, by which
I mean its therapeutic and social worth and how that worth was bound
up with gradations of pigment – with colour values (see Chapter 1). Like solar erythema, pigmentation above all was
understood in a visual way; it was a visible marker of changes happening on,
and in, the body upon exposure to light, and specifically to ultraviolet
radiation.

How is this different from sunburn as a visual ‘anchor’ (Chapter 2)? Because of their different durations they
had different roles to play: if solar erythema was an initial sign of the body’s responsiveness to actinic light,
pigmentation was a later, more permanent sign of its good effects and thus a
gauge of long-term prognosis for the patient. Curiously, unlike solar
erythema, pigmentation did not undergo attempts at standardisation. It was
not graded, measured, or compartmentalised in charts or through devices like
armlets. Albert Eidinow (NIMR) stated outright in 1925 that ‘There is no
method available at present to determine the degree of pigmentation in any
definite units’, nor did one develop in subsequent years.3 The desire for pigmentation manifested
differently from that of solar erythema as well, a desire that was
explicitly aestheticised, sexualised, and primivitised. It also played a
leading role in preventive, public measures.

For Victor Dane, a popular promoter and controversial
naturopath, pigmentation was the visible manifestation of ‘solar energy’
(ultraviolet radiation) stored in the body (see epigraph).4 He advocated both
sunbathing and the use of lamps to poor and rich alike in his 1929 book,
The Sunlight Cure. As is clear from the first epigraph by Sir
Leonard Hill (NIMR), Dane was not alone in encouraging the public. Despite
their vastly different credentials, they both perceived ultraviolet
radiation as having the capacity to protect the body by stimulating its
defensive powers against invading diseases.

Hill may have avoided producing pigmentation in his patients
– preferring short, intense doses of ultraviolet light that produced only
solar erythema, as we learned in Chapter 2 – but he
proudly spoke of taking sunbaths himself and lectured to public audiences
that bronzed skin was the marker of an ideal ‘A1’ citizen.5 Referencing a 1918
speech by Prime Minister David Lloyd George that ‘You cannot maintain an A1
Empire with a C3 nation’, military terms of fitness (A1) and unfitness (C3)
for combat were extended to the public realm.6 Raising the standard of health became a
national imperative, exacerbated by the catastrophic losses of the First
World War. The public were encouraged to build up a ‘healthy tan’
progressively, avoiding sunburn, as a protective measure in popular
newspapers.7 In
Hanovia’s ‘Homesun’ pamphlet, Hill was cited directly as one of many
authorities recommending its use, alongside Sir William Arbuthnot Lane
(President of the New Health Society), the surgeon Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter,
and the eugenicist Dr Caleb Saleeby (President of the Sunlight League).8 The ‘Homesun’ might be
prescribed for personal curative use by one’s physician, but it was
primarily designed for preventive use. Indeed, the pamphlet declared that
physicians themselves had requested Hanovia invent a home-use lamp for
preventive use by the general public, resulting in the first ‘Homesun’ model
of c. 1928.9
Whether Hill invested different values in suntan for the curative versus
preventive application of light is not clear, but his ambivalence towards it
is indicative of larger conflicting attitudes that have much to do with
eugenics, race, and public health at a time of heightened anxieties over
Britain as a degenerating ‘C3’ nation.10

This chapter is about bodies of colour,
of bodies saturated with radiation and visualised as literally ‘photogenic’
(light-generating). The words ‘radiant’, ‘glowing’, and ‘bronzed’ remain
part of everyday language to describe suntan, they are now naturalised and
normalised descriptors, but during the early twentieth century they became
powerful, highly aestheticised evocations of the irradiated body’s emanating
health. References to suntanned skin also as ‘bronzed’ (metallic, shiny and
reflective), in particular, can be found in medical and popular literature
alike.11 As with Chapter 4, this chapter focuses heavily on public
advertisements, notably the ‘Homesun’ colour pamphlet, but also popular
photographs in illustrated texts and the nudist magazine, Sun Bathing
Review (1933–59). Through these images I explore connections between
sunlight, sexuality, and tanned skin.

Many practitioners, government officials, and eugenicists
greatly desired tanned skin for the British public, and manufacturers and
tourist companies offered light for consumption in the battle against ‘sun
starvation’. This, according to Hanovia’s pamphlet, was defined as the
‘shortage of ultra-violet rays’ marked by ‘pallor, sallow skin … combined
with loss of “tone,” lack of energy, and low resistance to infection’.12 The ‘sun-starved’
body was therefore implicitly drained of colour, signalling a body drained
of energy. In its many advertisements Hanovia made explicit references to
light as a ‘food’ to be literally consumed, a vital nutrient for the body
that the urban-dwelling British population lacked (Fig.
5.1).

5.1 Advertisement for the Hanovia ‘Homesun’
lamp.

In Countryman, January 1939, p. 454. Author’s
collection.

As I explain in Section I, rich and
poor alike received therapeutic exposures of light in hospitals, health
centres, clinics, and at home, and, as they internalised and consumed the
light’s penetrative rays, their bodies were perceived to gain unparalleled
vitality and regenerative force, for the benefit of individual and nation.
Natural and artificial light were directed onto mothers’ malfunctioning
breasts, ‘backwards’ children, and wounded soldiers. In regenerating these
highly valued subjects, practitioners and politicians alike perceived light
as an aid to national salvation.13

Yet, as we discover in Section II,
in encouraging citizens to emulate the dark skins of ‘primitive’ races, they
betray deep-seated and ambivalent attitudes towards the merits of suntanned
skin. This ambivalence resided in varying conceptions of suntan’s function
(as a help or hindrance to bodily health), its duration (relative
permanence), and its depth (colour saturation). Even Hanovia’s pamphlet
expressed doubt towards ‘deep’ tans: The real value in using the lamp is not
for the purpose of tanning; that is only incidental. The deeper the tan, the
less benefit obtained’; and, ‘Exposures can be increased gradually up to
long periods, but they only put more tan on to the skin, not more health
into the body.14

The porous boundary between desire and
fear towards suntan leaks out in black-and-white too (Fig.
5.2). Lewis Baumer’s (1870–1963) 1936 Punch cartoon uses
close parallel lines to express the darker value of fashionable sunbathers’
skin. To the alarm of the uninitiated, their pigment, complemented by
slick-backed hair, exposed flesh, and cigarettes in hand, denotes a new and
confident sense of ‘respectability’ that ironically resided in negrophilia.
In Sultry Climates, Ian Littlewood situated new desires for suntanned
skin within the interwar period. He posited that the suntan was, and
continues to be, an act of emulation for all things ‘black’, the
pigmentation signifying a newly obtained, ‘borrowed’
primitivised sexuality. As such the tan was perceived, and perhaps today
remains indirectly understood, as an erotic and hedonistic ‘cultural sign of
the savage and the sensual’.15 In this context the suntan may have been
displayed as a surface ‘coat’ or mask, a topical coloured pellicule
(see Chapters 3 and 4) to be
worn and shed at will by implicitly white participants, but as a sign, it
was always more than skin-deep.16

The very legibility of the tan, its colour value and its
extent of coverage on the body, could equally be read in terms of
regeneration – of healing, adaptation and growth – or degeneration – of
primitivism, atavism, and base sexuality. That so many light therapists, who
actively encouraged and desired pigmentation as the path to the regeneration
of both individual and nation, held eugenic beliefs brings such tensions to
the (skin’s) surface. With the photogenic bodies of Hanovia’s ‘Homesun’
users guiding my analysis, this chapter investigates suntan as
simultaneously a visual marker of recharged health and a troubling act of
racial transgression during a period of developing eugenic fervour in
Britain and Europe.

I Understanding suntan

The role of suntan (pigmentation) was,
like that of solar erythema, hotly debated and ambivalently described by
light therapists during the early twentieth century. In the majority, practitioners attributed to suntan a protective function of
the skin, in which melanin acted as a natural ‘screen’ or ‘filter’ against
the excessive action of ultraviolet light. This adaptive process was
generally understood to follow after solar erythema had been produced, so
that ‘sunburn’ and ‘suntan’ were understood as sequential reactions.
However, much diversity of opinion existed even on these points, some
physicians arguing that different wavelengths were responsible for solar
erythema and for pigmentation, others adamant that suntanned patients could
still be sunburnt (thus protective only to a certain extent), and still
others that pigmentation was not necessarily a reaction only to ultraviolet
light since it could be produced by a variety of sources, including
chemicals irritants (e.g., mustard plasters) and disease (e.g., body lice,
prurigo).17

As discussed in Chapter 2, in Britain
leading researchers Sir Leonard Hill and Albert Eidinow of the MRC’s
National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) considered suntan a hindrance
to the therapeutic process because it performed its protective role too
well: once pigmentation had been produced, it impeded the penetration of
ultraviolet radiation’s further beneficial effects into the body,
necessitating longer and longer exposures. For this reason they recommended
short, intense doses that aimed to produce only mild erythema – a transient,
light ‘sunburn’ that would not result in pigmentation. This method was not
only more economical (requiring shorter running times of the lamps), it kept
the patient’s body in a light-sensitive state and, implicitly, white.

In opposition, other equally well-respected practitioners,
such as Britain’s leading heliotherapist Sir Henry Gauvain of the Treloar
Hospital for Crippled Children in Hampshire, considered pigmentation vital
to the cure. They avoided producing solar erythema in favour of pigmentation
through careful, graduated acclimation. In doing so Gauvain followed the
widespread method of the famous Swiss heliotherapist, Dr Auguste Rollier (Fig. 2.10). For Rollier and his fellow countryman,
the surgeon and heliotherapist Oskar Bernhard, as well as many French
heliotherapists, pigmentation was celebrated early on as a gauge: a
key, visual indicator of the therapy’s efficacy and thus a sign of
prognosis.18 It was
described in the 1910s by Professor Louis Landouzy, the dean of the faculty
of medicine in Paris and one of the first vice-presidents of the French
Eugenics Society, as a ‘barometer’ of the cure, a natural instrument with
which to forecast therapeutic success or failure.19 The idea held considerable currency in
Britain, in spite of Hill’s different method. As the well-known promoter of
‘helio-hygiene’ and the founder of the Sunlight League, the eugenicist Dr
Caleb Saleeby, noted in his 1923 Sunlight and Health,

we must remember that pigmentation of the skin is
a marked feature of the sun-cure, and that patients who do not
pigment well do not progress well[;]‌ no one who has seen and
touched the typical pigmented skin of a heliotherapeutic patient can doubt that very active chemical
processes are there occurring.20

By 1929,
Dane still described it thusly in his popular treatise to the public:

Pigmentation is the gauge of the sun cure, and
those parts of the body which are well pigmented must be counted as
richer in vital energy and in resistance to disease than other
parts. Where an invalid does not take to the sun easily it means
that progress is slow.21

In the previous chapter I explained
there was much interest as to the depth of ultraviolet radiation’s
penetration into the body’s interior. As more and more practitioners
accepted ultraviolet radiation’s relatively minimal depth of penetration,
confined to the skin’s upper layers, they tried to understand why and how
these beneficial wavelengths instigated changes deep within the body, and
they looked to pigmentation for an answer. Early on, Rollier argued that
pigmentation was a ‘transformer’ of light wavelengths, converting
ultraviolet rays into heat rays, which were known to penetrate deeply into
the body.22 He equally
argued that pigmentation naturally inoculated the body from infection, an
exterior shield that allowed the body to withstand invading attacks of
epidemic fevers, rashes, and acne.23 Of Rollier’s British followers, Gauvain explained
the transformative powers of melanin as analogous with those of
chlorophyll:

Pigment once formed appears to have two effects:
it has a protective rôle and permits prolonged exposure to light and
air without danger, and it has been suggested that it has a
transforming faculty, converting the physical energy of sunlight
into chemical energy which can be made use of in the body on the
analogy of the chlorophyll pigment of the plant.24

Others
compared chlorophyll with the blood as another sensitised substance with the
power to transform light wavelengths.25 Hill and Eidinow sceptically acknowledged
Rollier’s conceptions of pigmentation as a ‘transformer’ and ‘sensitiser’
but remained ambivalent as to whether melanin could simultaneously enable
(‘transform’) and hinder (‘protect’) ultraviolet radiation’s bodily
penetration.26 In
Sunshine and Open Air, Hill declared: ‘In the skin the pigment
[like chlorophyll and pigment in the iris] acts as a screen protecting the
deeper tissues from excess of radiation, and as a converter of light into
heat, also as a sensitizer to the sensory nerves.’27 Yet, later in the same work,
discussing the use of ultraviolet light to fight rickets, he pointed out
that,

Pigmentation hinders the action; longer exposure
is needed … [and] negro babies in New York are found to be more
susceptible than white babies to rickets. This
fact is against the view put forward by Rollier, that pigmentation
is favourable for heliotherapy, and that the pigment acts as a
transformer in the tissues of light rays into some other form of
radiation, which has a beneficial effect.28

This is but
one example of the ambivalent attitudes in Britain towards the role or
‘value’ of pigmentation to gauge light therapy’s efficacies. Further
ambivalence existed when it came to different kinds of pigmentation,
dependent upon the light source: mercury vapour lamps, carbon arc lamps, and
natural sunlight could apparently produce different colour values,
densities, and durations of pigmentation. Internationally, physicians cited
that natural sunlight produced pigmentation more rapidly, ‘denser’ and
longer lasting than artificial light.29 Of the latter, Dr James Sequeira noted
pigmentation occurred quicker with carbon arc lamps than with mercury vapour
lamps, and for Dr John Harvey Kellogg it was more ‘pronounced’ if produced
by carbon arc lamps.30
Colour values were different too, and inconsistently so. Some described the
mercury vapour lamp as producing a ‘pale yellowish-brown’, others a
‘greyish’ pigmentation.31
The ‘Homesun’, like the ‘Vi-tan’ and the ‘Alpine Sun Lamp’ (Chapter 4), was a mercury vapour lamp, yet Hanovia’s
pamphlet advertised its beneficial effects with a highly saturated orange to
denote users’ pigmentation (Plates 2–5). On colour variations, Eidinow
stated,

The sun gives rise to a dark brown-black
pigmentation. The Finsen [carbon] arc also gives rise to a
dark-coloured pigment. The long white flame [carbon] arcs and
tungsten arcs give a reddish-brown pigmentation, the mercury vapour
lamp a pale yellowish-brown pigmentation. Patients who have been
exposed to the sun and are black-skinned gradually lose their
pigment, and become a lighter brown on exposure to the mercury
vapour lamp or open long flame [carbon] arc.32

Just as Hill
asserted pigmentation’s problematic role as a shield with reference to
rickety ‘negro babies’, so Eidinow explained its curious loss, upon exposure
to artificial light, in already black-skinned patients with specific
reference to race. Above all, as a form of natural protection – a bodily
adaptation – pigmentation was understood in relation to, and explanatory of,
racial difference. It continues to do so today, under the politically
correct categorisation of six skin ‘phototypes’, developed from the 1970s by
American dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick.33

Thirty years before Hill’s and Eidinow’s 1925 statements,
Finsen pointed out that the distribution of races across the globe could be
‘naturally’ accounted for by pigment’s protective function:

The colour of peoples and different races is thus
easily explained: the nearer we approach the equator the darker the
coloration of the skin becomes, and the more remote we go the
lighter it is. The red and yellow colours of the Indians and
Mongolians present characters of practical value in that they absorb
all the chemical rays, but the black skin absorbs the luminous rays
still more […] But, speaking generally a European who lives in
tropical countries notices that his skin takes on a darker
coloration, while the black colour of negroes who come to Europe is
diminished in a sensible degree.34

In circular
logic, racial differences and distribution played crucial roles for
understanding the pigmentation of the (implicitly white) skin of the patient
through frequent reference to the naturally dark, protective pigment of the
‘negro’.35 Eidinow’s
and Finsen’s off-handed references to colour loss will crop up later in
addressing eugenics, preventive health measures, and the ambivalent
aesthetic desirability of ‘deep’ tans among white European and British
citizens.

For now, it is worth noting one further, debated therapeutic
function of pigment. The theory belonged to Dr Albert Jesionek, a German
light therapist practising in Giessen and namesake of the Jesionek lamp.
Attempting to understand how ultraviolet radiation penetrated deeply into
the body, he reasoned that unknown substances in pigment itself might be
passed into the bloodstream and carried throughout the body. By interrupting
the treatment to ‘de-pigment’ patients – keeping them in the dark for
intervals of time – these substances could be released as melanin was
absorbed down into the blood.36 This was not the last time that practitioners
toyed with intervals of pigmenting and ‘de-pigmenting’ patients. Jesionek’s
theory gave rise to a more general conceptualisation of pigmentation’s
value; namely, that it physically absorbed and ‘stored’ ultraviolet
radiation. Dr Elizabeth Anderson (Middlesex Hospital) explained in 1935: ‘It
is possible that pigment also stores up the products of ultra-violet
irradiation of the skin, liberating them by degrees, and thereby prolonging
and enhancing the chemical effects at a later date.’37 Like the blood, pigment was perceived
to possess key absorptive properties that rendered the body literally
photogenic.

Saturated blood

As mentioned above, the analogy of
chlorophyll was confusingly applied to explain the functions both of pigment
and blood. Sensitised to actinic light and able to ‘store’ absorbed
radiation, pigment and blood fascinated practitioners as the primary
carriers of light into the body. If ultraviolet light only minimally
penetrated the skin, its internalisation (consumption) was theoretically
explained using the laws of physics: Draper’s Law (1842) stated that light
can only act where it is absorbed, a law that was
influential not only to light therapists but to photographers like Hermann
Wilhelm Vogel (see Chapter 3), searching for methods
to capture light’s full spectral range onto sensitised plates – in other
words, to the beginnings of colour photography.38

That blood absorbed actinic light was known to Finsen: ‘no
living tissue absorbs so much light as the blood, and, more than that, the
blood absorbs a considerable quantity of the [ultra]violet rays’.39 His method for
treating lupus vulgaris with local phototherapy, however, was orientated
around blood as a problem, a far too efficient screen that, like
pigmentation, hindered light’s penetration. Finsen sought to drain blood
away from lupus vulgaris lesions by means of compressors, hoping for deeper
penetration of the actinic rays to reach the source of tuberculous infection
(Fig. 2.7). But his perception of blood as an
inhibitor to the internalisation of actinic light gave way to widespread
views that blood enabled its bodily consumption.

Light absorption of the blood preoccupied British
researchers. As Dr William Beaumont, medical director of the Institute of
Ray Therapy, succinctly put it: ‘It is the absorption of the
electro-magnetic waves that is the basis of ray therapy.’40 At the NIMR, Hill, Eidinow, and
Leonard Colebrook analysed irradiated blood samples during the 1920s to
investigate light’s effects on human physiology. One major find, as stated
in Chapter 2, was that ultraviolet light increased the
blood’s bactericidal powers based on measuring raised haemoglobin levels,
and this can account for Hill’s and Dane’s opening statements that light
stimulated bodily ‘resistance’ to disease.41 Case studies routinely reported
haemoglobin levels before, during, and after light treatment.42 (It should also be
reiterated that Hill’s team had discovered that overdoses could
lower the blood’s germ-killing powers, necessitating careful
dosages of ultraviolet light.)

In popular books for the public, such as Dane’s, the language
chosen to explain the light’s stimulation of the blood and its production of
highly desirable pigmentation is significant; it is the textual equivalent
of Hanovia’s visualisation of saturated, glowing orange suntans (Plates
2–5). Both textually and visually these publicly disseminated
representations might seem at first to verge on pure hyperbole. For
instance, in the 1926 English translation of Dr Franz Thedering’s
Sunlight as Healer: A Popular Treatise, which notably included a
foreword by Lane (the New Health Society’s president), light absorption of
the blood was conveyed as follows: ‘The general effect of light, its
influence on the blood and metabolism, is based on the power of the rays to
penetrate the tissues and, caught by the blood, to be “absorbed,” so that
the blood is loaded with irradiative energy.’43

What did it mean for the body, and specifically the blood, to
be ‘loaded with irradiative energy’? Was this hyperbolic?

Importantly, it was not. As with electro-therapy and other
forms of radiation therapy, the underlying concept here was one of energy
transfer.44 As
Rollier stated, ‘light absorbed by blood changes it
into a receptacle of radiant energy’.45 Like a battery or solar cell, this energy was
absorbed, stored, and then depleted upon use, necessitating further
exposures. Hanovia’s advertisements recommended ultraviolet light to
revitalise the body on the analogy of ‘winding up a clock’, and advocates of
light’s health benefits continue today to speak of ‘storing’ up ultraviolet
energy to supply British bodies with vitamin D during the winter months.46

Dane explained that ‘solar energy’ was converted into and
stored as ‘human energy’, externalised by a glowing tan (see epigraph). For
Thedering, Dane, and many others the blood, like pigmentation, was
fundamental to internalising and ‘storing’ light rays. Once saturated with
irradiative energy, the skin and blood were described internationally by
practitioners as having the capability to produce their own light.
Eidinow wrote in 1925 that, ‘When the skin is irradiated with ultraviolet
rays it has been shown to demonstrate marked fluorescence’, while others
reported early experiments that irradiated blood could make impressions on
photographic plates by giving off ultraviolet energy.47 Blood analyses, carried out at the
NIMR and in Germany by paediatrician Kurt Huldschinsky, also indicated that
light increased the body’s production of calcium, closely associated with
the discovery of vitamin D and the treatment of rickets. But so too were
levels of phosphorus (phosphates) raised in the blood, bringing to mind Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the
Baskervilles (1901–2), in which the demonic beast glows by means of
phosphorus.48 Like
the doomed patients of over-zealous radium experiments, bodies saturated
with ultraviolet light were perceived to literally glow.49

Punch cartoons played on these associations by
conflating child users with the modern and shiny metallic surfaces of
home-use technological apparatus, and even with the light itself (Figs. 5.3–5.4): little
‘Chromium’ and ‘Ultra Violet Ray’ take their artificial exposures in modern,
sophisticated urban dwellings, to the delight of their progressive
parents.50 Note also
that Baumer’s 1936 Punch illustration gives the tanned skin of his
hip figures depth and shine with highlighting, achieved through negative
white space on their cheeks, necks, arms, and legs (Fig.
5.2). In 1930s posters for Rollier’s Leysin sanatoria and the
British Wiggleworth’s ‘Golden Tan’ sunscreen (Plates 6–7), the lithe
contouring of attractive, healthy bodies is emphasised by bold white
outlines.51 In these
representations the ‘photogenic’ body – beautiful because it is
irradiative and pigmented – is proudly displayed by means of dynamic colour
offset by white contouring: Jacomo Müller’s leaping figure is further
outlined in bright red, encapsulating an entirely black silhouette, while
the ‘Golden Tan’ users present glowing, rounded forms by means of gradations
of dark and light brown highlighting. Returning to the ‘Homesun’ pamphlet
(Plates 2–5), the glowing, saturated suntans of Hanovia’s smiling models are
equally compelling precisely because they appear to generate their own
light. Bordering on fluorescent, the orange pigment coating the ‘Homesun’ users emerges forth from the din of black-and-white
surroundings, shocking and delighting the eye.

‘Eating’ sunshine

Of the varying ways the body could
internalise light, so far we have learned that practitioners conceptualised
pigmented skin and blood as highly absorptive, photosensitive, and even
photogenic upon saturation with ultraviolet radiation. But patients’ bodies
were also perceived to consume light directly through the orifices: the
ears, nose, and throat; the mouth; as well as the vagina, urethra, and anus
(Fig. 5.5). Unsettling images of these techniques
are confined to irradiation of the mouth, especially in
dental light therapy (Fig. 5.6). In Chapter 4, we encountered experiments to transilluminate and
penetrate the body with light by means of applicators, lenses, and mirrors.
In the case of Figure 5.6, a 1928 photograph
demonstrating treatment of gingivitis by the British dentist Francis Talbot,
a patient appears to physically consume or ‘eat’ the light. It is clear from
advertising copy and popular literature that the notion of ‘eating’ light
went beyond convenient metaphor: consumption here was literal, even if
Talbot’s patient strikes us as an extreme example.

Raymond Williams remarked that ‘consumption’ is a peculiar
bodily metaphor to describe the public use of goods and services, having
little relevance to explain how people actually use and engage with the
things they buy.52
However, in the case of light therapy it is vital to understanding how light
was ‘consumed’ by patients and the British public. Just as radium could be
ingested in the form of radioactive chocolates and toothpaste, so could
ultraviolet radiation enter the body through one’s pores by means of
impregnated creams and orally via irradiated bread and milk.53 Interwar
advertisements for ‘Ultraviolet ray cream’, ‘Sunshine bread’, and
‘Ultraviolet ray bread’ appear in local newspapers while, more reputably,
milk treated by ultraviolet lamps was advocated by leading physicians.54 Notable among these
was (later Sir) Edward Mellanby, professor of
pharmacology at the University of Sheffield and consultant physician at the
Royal Sheffield Infirmary, who conducted pioneering research on rickets. At
the infirmary, one of Mellanby’s colleagues, S. J. Cowell, carried out
MRC-funded experiments in which he gave milk exposed to ultraviolet
radiation to rickety children and noted marked improvements in bone
calcification, in contrast to a control group of children given ordinary
milk.55

Earlier, Huldschinsky (1919) and American paediatrician
Alfred Fabian Hess (1921) both provided evidence that rickets could be
treated with artificial or natural sunlight and, along with Mellanby and the
American biochemist Elmer Verner McCollum, conducted research that led to
the discovery of vitamin D during the 1910s–20s.56 Hess, as well as Harry Steenbock,
professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, further
showed that irradiating foodstuffs such as milk with ultraviolet light
rendered them antirachitic, leading to many experiments from the 1920s
onwards in which vegetables, oils, and cereals were exposed to ultraviolet
lamps. As Sally Dunne Romano argued, ‘Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s the
“cutting edge science” of the time, vitamin biochemistry, reaffirmed the
health benefits of sunlight … and were well publicized in the popular press,
which served to further solidify the popular connection between sunlight and
health.’57

While many practitioners advocated
vitamin D consumption solely through dietary means, such as cod liver oil,
others promoted exposure to ultraviolet light as the best means to prevent
or cure rickets in children. Some physicians even reported that cod liver
oil itself was naturally impregnated with ultraviolet radiation once
oxidised, making photographic impressions just as irradiated blood had been
shown to do.58 During a
period obsessed with diet, measuring national health, and advancing
nutrition research, ultraviolet light was understood as a vital food source
for the body.59

This notion that light could be ‘eaten’ occurs surprisingly
early on, the French naturist Dr Albert Monteuuis describing sunlight as
‘solar nutrition’ already by 1911: ‘Because of the colouration of their skin
and their manner of living semi-nude, Negroes are better adapted to feed
directly on the rays of the sun.’60 Conflating diet and sunshine even further, the
famous Danish gymnastics educator, Lieutenant Jørgen Peter Müller, described
the process of consuming fresh fruit as ‘eating sunshine’, a popular way of
expressing to the British public the importance of internalising sunlight.61 Dr Edward J. Deck, of
the London Light Clinic (Pimlico), similarly declared in his 1926 populist
book for the Sunlight League, The Sun and How to Use It:

It is the action of the Sun which causes the
chemical changes that supply the nourishing properties of food […]
The quality of milk is largely affected by the fodder on which the
cows feed, and the quality of the fodder depends upon the amount of
Sunlight it can absorb. It is essential for good milk that the cows
should have a plentiful supply of green leaves which contain the
necessary vitalizing properties, and these green leaves are
themselves a Sun product. The highest quality of milk can only be
produced by cows that are fed in the Sunlight on fodder
growing in the Sunlight.62

To that end,
pigs and cows were irradiated with lamps at ‘electric farms’ in Britain to
impart the necessary ultraviolet energy to their flesh and milk.63 An article on ‘Vita’
glass in The Times’ ‘Sunlight and Health’ supplement promoted its use
on farms, stating that vegetables ripened quicker and poultry bred and
reared their young earlier, with the national implication that British
market gardeners and poultry breeders could outstrip foreign competitors.64 Even cigarettes were
irradiated by artificial sunlight; the tobacco ‘mellowed’ and became less
irritable to the throat and lungs by ultraviolet light’s action.65

In a 1928 advertisement, Hanovia explicitly referred to
ultraviolet light as a food to combat ‘sun starvation’: ‘Light is a
necessity to life. Where the vital ultra-violet rays are cut off the
community suffers. Thousands are only half fit because they are only half
fed. It is not solid food they lack – it is light food.’ By eating
sunshine, Britain’s restored urban dwellers would become profitable and
productive citizens, with Hanovia ‘show[ing] the way to an A-I nation’.66 Invested in
regenerating the British race alongside social campaigners like Saleeby and
his Sunlight League, Hanovia marketed ultraviolet radiation as an aid to
national salvation.67 The
mother and child of its ‘Homesun’ cover (Plate 3) thus
emerge as significant socio-political entities and their pigmentation as a
politically loaded marker of citizenship. Put simply, they are model British
citizens because they are tanned: they are beautiful (photogenic),
well-‘fed’, fully functioning members of society.

II Radiant ‘primitives’

The body’s internalisation
(‘consumption’) of light was registered by decidedly external signs. This
invisible process needed to be assessed on visible changes and, moreover,
visualised to disseminate its efficacies. Much of this book has
concentrated on the reddening or bronzing of the skin. But it also
manifested externally through the augmenting of bodily contours, such as
improved muscle tone and weight gain, the closing of fetid wounds, and the
expelling of necrotic bone and tissue. All of these were imaged in before
and after photographs and discussed in case studies. Rollier was particularly adept at imaging these bodily
alterations, focusing on the plump contours, bronzed skin, and closed
tubercular lesions of his healed child patients. He even included
photographs of fragments of diseased bone expelled by the body during the
cure (Fig. 5.7).68

5.7 [Decaux
or Rossier], before and after photographs of a tuberculous
child.

Other bodily products were pulled forth
from the interior, notably blood to the surface (hyperaemia) and milk out of
the breasts. These last two were particularly valued when it came to
treating women’s disorders, restoring impaired lactation and menstruation.
As a result we find many references to physicians directing artificial
sunlight onto women’s breasts, abdomens, and genitals, as well as inside the
vaginal canal. When Hill spoke of ultraviolet radiation activating the
‘sexual power of citizens’ (see epigraph), it is clear the citizens he was
especially keen to sexually activate were women. Light therapy was strongly
centred on women’s procreativity and their children in public health
measures. Indeed, one of the reasons rickets concerned practitioners so much
was that it affected the normal formation of the female pelvis, affecting
healthy child-rearing. The British obstetrician Kathleen Vaughan, for
instance, argued that particular emphasis should be placed on irradiating
future mothers of the race, namely girls fourteen and under, so as to
provide sufficient vitamin D to fortify the bones with calcium before their
pelvises deformed from rickets, which, she argued, was responsible for high
maternal mortality rates.69 Light-therapy facilities at Labour-driven modern
health centres, such as the Bermondsey Public Health Centre (1936, with
lamps equipped by Hanovia) and the Finsbury Health Centre (1938, designed by
Soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin) were geared especially towards
women and children.70

Perhaps it is not coincidental that Hanovia disseminated and
advertised its products to the public with images of mothers and children
(Plates 2–3). In its 1940 ‘Homesun’ pamphlet, expectant and nursing mothers
were singled out as especially in need of ultraviolet irradiation due to
depleted calcium and phosphorus levels in the blood, lost during pregnancy
to support the developing foetus. Hanovia also claimed the ‘Homesun’ lamp
could prevent depression and morning sickness during pregnancy, a notion
supported by contemporaneous medical recommendations.71

Irradiation of pregnant women occurred throughout Britain at
various public health clinics and centres, especially at infant-welfare
clinics. As one physician argued,

If there is a marked ultra-violet light deficiency
[during pregnancy] the child will be malformed; great deficiency
could produce a monster. If the mother has plenty of ultra-violet
light the child starts life with a stored up amount of the products
of light and is able to better resist disease.72

Again, note
the perception that the baby would emerge from the mother’s womb already
‘charged’ with stored light rays, ready to face the world. Nursing mothers
experiencing difficulties breastfeeding their newborns were additionally
treated at these centres, among them the North Islington Infant Welfare
Centre, where Dr Dora Colebrook worked during the mid-1920s. Before her
damning reports on light therapy (see Chapter 2), she
reported successful cases of working mothers whose failing lactation was restored or improved, particularly those who
attended regularly and learned how to weigh their babies before and after
feeds so as to track the milk quantities produced and ingested.73 Surveillance and
careful conditioning of ‘scientific’ habits meant these working women could
prove to be productive members of society, in keeping with the cult of
‘scientific motherhood’ in vogue at the time, and thus ideal ‘race
mothers’.74

Dr Catherine Chisholm, the first woman in Manchester to
obtain a medical degree and founder of the Manchester Babies Hospital,
similarly conducted a study on the benefits of irradiating nursing mothers
at the Manchester Municipal Sun Clinic in 1927.75 Those mothers with depleted calcium
levels – thus endangering themselves and their newborns to rickets – and
those experiencing difficulties breastfeeding underwent general phototherapy
to the whole body as well as local phototherapy on the abdomen and breasts.
Hanovia’s 1933 handbook for practitioners, Actinotherapy Technique,
advised treating impaired lactation locally with the Alpine Sun Lamp, aiming
to produce second- or third-degree erythemas on the breasts.76 Babies already
affected by rickets could be cured by irradiating the mother, who would then
– ‘loaded with irradiative energy’ – pass on her antirachitic milk to her
infant.77 The milk
supply therefore was not only increased but considered more nutritious. In
Hanovia’s ‘Homesun’ pamphlet, both mother and child receive these
restorative exposures, their bodies glowing with the saturated radiation
impregnated within (Plate 2).

More invasive treatments involved ultraviolet radiation
inserted directly into the vagina. British practitioners were guided by
German methods, such as those developed by Dr Wilhelm Flaskamp of Erlangen
University’s Gynaecological Clinic. He spoke at the second International
Conference on ‘Light and Heat in Medicine and Surgery’, held at the
University of London in 1928 and organised by Drs William Russell and
Richard King-Brown (the latter Bermondsey’s medical officer of health and
editor of the British Journal of Actinotherapy and Physiotherapy).
The paper and its responses were published in the conference proceedings,
and the comments by British physicians indicate they were particularly
receptive and intrigued by Flaskamp’s special devices and methods. These
included a ‘light bidet’ and various applicators that were added as
extensions onto mercury vapour and carbon arc lamps (Fig.
5.8).78 With
these he treated external genital inflammations (e.g., vulvitis, ulcers and
traumas such as tears), internal infections such as thrush and vaginitis, as
well as many uterine conditions, including endometritis and even tumours on
the fallopian tubes. Gauvain similarly spoke of treating lupus of the vulva
with local light treatment at Treloar’s.79

In this respect, the history of light therapy shares
important similarities with those of X-ray and radium therapies, both
heavily focused on treating gynaecological disorders and internal cancers,
especially of the cervix (see Chapter 4). Radium tubes, applicators, and needles were ‘packed’ into the
vaginal and uterine canals to treat cancerous growths, known as ‘radium
bombs’ (Fig. 5.9).80 As Matthew Lavine explained, radiotherapy’s
intense focus on irradiating the female reproduction system could be
viewed

as a reflection of the persistent sexual undertone
that attended discussion of x-rays: ‘exposure’ suggests voyeurism.
Nervous jokes about electrical pepping toms and lead-lined
undergarments were a commonplace of nuclear culture, and ubiquitous
in its early days. (Radium, too, was sexualized: it was broadly
understood to be somehow ‘alive’, and that vitality quickly became
equated with sexual potency via patent medicines aimed at both
sexes.)81

5.9 George
Edmondson Birkett, placement of radium tubes for the treatment
of cervical cancer at the Fondation Curie.

X-ray proof underwear, for example,
was offered to protect women from the rays’ penetrative gaze by a London dry
goods company during the 1890s at the height of X-ray ‘mania’.82 Female genitalia were
thus seen to be especially responsive to these ‘exposures’, both overtly
benefiting from and covertly vulnerable to the effects of short-wave
radiation. Ultraviolet radiation must be included among this therapeutic
group of penetrating rays, desirable for specialised gynaecological use
while simultaneously threatening moral and physical harm. Dr William K.
Russell, for example, may have welcomed Flaskamp to speak at the 1928
conference, but in his 1925 book, co-authored with his
wife and colleague Dr Eleanor Russell, they stated that, ‘clothing materials
which are partly transparent to ordinary light are also penetrable by
ultra-violet rays. This is of importance when children or ladies are being
treated, as exposure of surfaces not intended to be irradiated could easily
result in the occurrence of erythema in undesired places.’83 They more explicitly
stated that the genital organs should be covered during general
treatments.84 For the
Russells, the dangers posed had to do with painful erythema (sunburn)
production in sensitive areas, but for others the concern lay with the
ultraviolet light’s action on menstrual blood. Ultraviolet light was prized
for its ability to increase blood flow (hyperaemia) as a way of relieving
pain, removing toxins, and carrying light energy to the tissues and organs.
When it came to the blood circulating within women’s reproductive organs,
however, ultraviolet radiation could be both a blessing and a curse. Women
suffering from amenorrhoea (the absence of menstruation) or dysmenorrhoea
(painful or difficult menstruation) were considered especially suited to
light therapy, with Flaskamp and others recommending ultraviolet light to
restore proper functioning. But women being treated for other gynaecological
conditions – indeed ‘normal’ women in general, including ‘Homesun’ users –
were told to avoid light exposures during menstruation for fear of excessive
blood flow.85 As stated
in the last chapter, one female user apparently
suffered a miscarriage through misuse of a home-use lamp.

Sunlight and procreativity

More broadly, such perceptions about
ultraviolet radiation’s effects on female procreativity are fundamentally
intertwined with widely held views that southern, tropical climates
accounted for earlier puberty in young girls, especially among Arabic and
black African women.86
Heliotherapists on the Mediterranean coast made specific note of this, and
not simply to the climate’s heat but to its luminosity as responsible for
early menstruation and thus early sexual maturity:

On the Mediterranean coast and in particular on
the Riviera, menstruation is more precocious than in the climates of
the North. Young girls in general have regular periods by 10 or 11
years old; and this is not a fact of atavism, the same
phenomenon is observed amongst other children whose families,
originally from the North, come to live on the Côte d’Azur, and it
is to the great stupefaction of their parents.87

For
heliotherapists, the Côte d’Azur’s intense luminosity made it especially
beneficial to women’s ‘functional troubles’.88 In a publication on light and
gynaecology, Dr Malvine Brody of Grasse declared that ultraviolet light
could even reverse premature menopause, restoring menstruation in mature
patients.89 Hanovia
similarly declared in an advert that ‘Women undergoing
the change of life escape the troubles encountered at this time and enjoy
restored health’ with the use of their lamps.90 At a time when France, like Britain,
was rife with fears of depopulation, and the French Eugenics Society headed
by leading childcare physicians such as obstetrician Adolphe Pinard and
paediatrician Eugène Apert, heliotherapists’ faith in ultraviolet
radiation’s procreative powers should not be overlooked.91

Beliefs in the rays’ stimulating, sexualising powers in warm,
sunny climates were not confined to practitioners. Intriguing similarities
exist in the realm of popular literature, particularly the work of D. H.
Lawrence, who himself had pulmonary tuberculosis and convalesced on the Côte
d’Azur, in Bandol and Vence, where he died in 1930.92 In Lawrence’s short story ‘Sun’
(c. 1926), the protagonist, Juliet, is sent to the Italian
Riviera for her health. Experiencing fatigue and ‘women’s troubles’, her
doctor prescribes sunlight. Lawrence portrayed her prescribed sunbathing as
a hedonistic experience by now characteristic of both rivieras:

Every day, in the morning towards noon, she lay at
the foot of the powerful, silver-pawed cypress tree, while the sun
strode jovial in heaven. By now she knew the sun in every thread of
her body. Her heart of anxiety, that anxious, straining heart, had
disappeared altogether, like a flower that falls in the sun, and
leaves only a little ripening fruit. And her tense womb, though
still closed, was slowly unfolding, slowly, slowly, like a lily bud
under water, as the sun mysteriously touched it. Like a lily bud
under water it was slowly rising to the sun, to expand at last, to
the sun, only to the sun.93

In
Lawrence’s story, Juliet has nothing less than therapeutic sex with the sun.
Her ongoing, submissive exposure to the masculine sun’s penetrative energies
restores her sexual dysfunction, she feels inside ‘darker and more savage’
and revels in her body’s – as well as her exposed infant son’s –
‘rosy-golden’ tan.94
Again, such representations may strike us as hyperbolic, but Lawrence’s
sexually charged language can be similarly found in contemporaneous,
populist treatises. Influenced by Indian practices, Dane’s book recommended,
‘Whilst having a sun-bath the vital energy should be visualized, pouring
into the system and clearing away disease as a ball knocks over ninepins;
man should feel it filling the whole of his being with health, strength and
radiant vitality.’95 The
reader addressed here is male, but the book, whose cover features a man,
woman, and child facing the piercing graphic rays of the sun, was clearly
intended for the whole family. Dane advocated natural and artificial light
exposures to both sexes suffering from ‘glandular inactivity’, which
included ‘menstrual troubles, difficulties during puberty, and impotency’
and echoed the wider medical literature.96

While the Russells sought to protect the
genitals from ultraviolet radiation with dark fabrics in the vein of
X-ray-proof underwear, social-reform groups like the Men’s Dress Reform
Party, well-known practitioners like Hill, and manufacturers producing
ultraviolet-permitting silk fabrics like ‘Celanese’ lingerie suggest wider
initiatives to increase exposures to the reproductive organs rather than
limit them.97 The nudist
journal, Sun Bathing Review: Journal of the Sun Societies (f. 1933)
and its influential founders promoted nude sunbathing with a fascinating mix
of highly eroticised images alongside extracts of medical literature by
Britain’s leading light therapists.

The subject of genitalia, unfettered by fabric and exposed to
direct sunlight, was discussed in the journal by physicians and
psychologists, among them the highly respected British psychologist, John
Carl Flügel. In his 1933 article, extracted from The Psychology of
Clothes (1930), Flügel spoke of the delights of ‘skin eroticism’ by
the play of air and light on the body’s surface.98 In the same issue, Dr J. A. Braun
argued that ‘The human body was never meant to be covered with clothes; it
is the seat of an intense radio-activity receiving and emitting waves, and
this transmission cannot be performed if the body is isolated by clothes
from light and air.’99 He
described the unclothed body as emanating or breathing light energy, its
vital functions led by the sex glands and craving light’s stimulating
powers. The nudist’s conception of ‘sunbathing’ was therefore, in practice,
quite different from those who flocked to beaches or lidos clothed in
swimwear or shielded by parasols. For physicians like Thedering, the
nudist’s ‘natural’ lifestyle bordered on ‘solar fanaticism’.100

Early on, the cover of Sun Bathing Review featured an
engraving by artist Robert Gibbings, who also helped to found the journal
and contributed articles.101 Post-Cubist maternal bodies, a muscular adult male
and a confident, standing child occupy the grassy shores of a secluded pond
(Fig. 5.10). Gibbings’ economy of line skilfully
conveys elegant poses of sun worship in a few key strokes. Within a few
years this image was replaced by photographs, in keeping with its interior,
which was replete with black-and-white photographs of nude models and lay
enthusiasts.

Tentatively hedging the boundary between art and pornography,
Sun Bathing Review pictured photographs of nude, suntanned skin
in a variety of settings and styles, but the full-page spreads feature
highly aestheticised photographs in which genitalia, when visible, are
ambivalently effaced by means of obvious retouching (Fig.
5.11).102 Such
deliberation and effort indicate a conscious desire to maintain ‘decorum’
while simultaneously revelling in the glories of exposed, photogenic bodies,
no doubt both titillating and reassuring its readership. Indeed, the journal
encouraged the public to expose their fully nude bodies not only to natural
and artificial light but also to their personal cameras: it ran a
competition for readers to send in their own nude sunbathing snapshots,
which were judged and reproduced in subsequent issues in the well-established vein of bodybuilding magazines.103 This is not surprising when
considering that the Health and Strength League, encapsulated by the figure
of Eugen Sandow and with Müller as its vice-president, drove public
interests in both bodybuilding and sunbathing, and later Sun Bathing
Review was absorbed by the long-running Health &
Efficiency magazine (f. 1900).

The journal also included advertisements for discreet
photographic development by discerning printing companies, facilitating
exposures for the public and journal in equal measure.104 By these means readers could interact
with the journal as active participants in its formation and the naturist
movement as a whole. Such interaction was performed through the careful
surveillance of the self and others. This ‘healthy mode of sexualised
looking’, to quote Lisa Cartwright, must be understood as being successful
precisely because it naturalised medical knowledge about therapeutic light and medical practices of looking at the body.105 After all, the
journal included reputable medical literature to support nude sunbathing, in
which light therapy was called upon to legitimise naturism, just as it had
legitimised large-scale public-health campaigns like those of the Sunlight
League.106 In this
way the medical gaze was not ‘replaced’ by the lay enthusiast’s
self-reflexive gaze, but rather fully internalised as a normalised way of
monitoring one’s own health.107 And, like the physician, the enthusiast’s visual
gauge of progressing health was the tan.

Natural urges

Though men featured in some
photographs, like the ‘Homesun’ cover the visual focus of Sun Bathing
Review was overwhelmingly on women and children. One of its primary
contributors was photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, whose photograph of general
phototherapy at the SLHWC drove Chapter 3 (Fig. 3.1, c. 1934). For over a decade
Tudor-Hart supplied Sun Bathing Review with photographs,
predominantly of nude or semi-nude sunbathing children (Fig. 5.12). An early contribution of her photographs appeared in
1935, accompanying the words of none other than Sir Henry Gauvain in an
interview on heliotherapy.108 In these photographs the children were usually shot
at close range and appear relaxed, happy and confident – much like the child
of the ‘Homesun’ cover (Plate 3) – and suggest
familiarity and intimacy between photographer and subject. In addition to
penning articles herself, Tudor-Hart also, less frequently, contributed
photographs of nude women for the journal (Fig. 5.13).
Notably in her work they are anonymised by artful turns of the head, away from the camera. Whether anonymity was
deliberately desired by the models or by Tudor-Hart is unclear, but the
effect simply facilitates the reader’s unobstructed delectation of exposed
breasts and skin.

Suntanned skin held significant erotic charge for the
photographers of Sun Bathing Review. Main contributors Bertram Park
(the journal’s ‘Honorary Art Editor’) and Yvonne Gregory expressed intense
interest in and preference for tanned models, which they discussed in their
1935 publication, Sun Bathers, and in an article for the journal on
the difficulties of photographing nude bodies (extracted from a lecture Park
gave at the annual congress of the Professional Photographers’ Association
the same year). In both texts they described the photogenic superiority of
‘rich sun bronze’ over ‘lifeless’ and ‘colourless’ pale
skin from the photographer’s aesthetic viewpoint. In the opening of Sun
Bathers, Park and Gregory declared:

How much more beautiful is the rich sun bronze of
many models now to be seen, revelling in the full enjoyment of the
freedom and health which the casting off of clothes promotes. True,
the joy of colour can only be fully appreciated pictorially with the
paint-box, but in translating the colour to monochrome and working
with the camera the warm tints of the air-tanned body have
infinitely more life and luminosity than the almost dead complexion
of a skin that has never really been touched by the light of day.109

For these
photographers, pale skin proved a resistant subject to the searching eye of
the camera and its photosensitive film, frustrating the production of
quality, artistic prints. It was, quite simply, not ‘photogenic’. It was an
aesthetic ‘dead’ end – an antagonist to the camera set in contrast to the
‘lively’ and ‘warm’ values of bronzed skin, which far more willingly
complied as a light-generative surface, ripe for photographic capture. This
is a curious reversal to the preferences of nineteenth-century
photographers, who praised the aesthetic merits of, and ease of capturing,
pale skin over darker tones.110

Primarily a photographic catalogue of plates, their book is
replete with solo and group compositions with female-only nudes. Like
Tudor-Hart’s photograph (Fig. 5.13), Park and
Gregory’s plates, such as Siesta (Fig. 5.14),
represent nude women in secluded outdoor settings like
contemporary nymphs in their natural environments. The models were situated
in either forest settings or against antique backdrops, as in Figure 5.14. The writer and journalist Alan Warwick,
in the book’s introduction, singled out this plate as ‘one of the most
beautiful in the book’, declaring:

The truth is that it is representative of woman
sleeping naked by an ancient stone bath – sleeping lightly in the
mellow sunlight, and as gloriously free and unselfconscious as the
faint breeze that caresses her skin. I will go further than that,
and say that for every hundred women of which that picture at one
time or another is actually representative, it symbolizes the
unvoiced longing of thousands of her sisters who, if they had the
courage or the opportunity, would embrace the chance to be as free
as she of the clothes complex and fear.111

For Warwick, the model’s photogenic
skin, which erotically elicits both gaze and touch, made the photograph as
equally titillating to his (male) gaze as to that of a vast female public
audience; it provoked envy and didactically spread the naturist’s call for
unfettered exposure, free of fear, for the greater good.

If we compare these ‘artistic’ popular photographs with
medical photographs of female patients, the boundary demarcating popular
from medical photography begins to crumble on aesthetic grounds. Bernhard’s
1917 Sonnenlichtbehandlung in der Chirurgie and its expanded 1926
English translation, Light Treatment in Surgery, included before and
after images of graphic war wounds alongside erotically charged images of
female patients (Figs. 5.15–5.16). The language of his texts uneasily mixed detached, technical, and scientific explanations of the therapy’s
principles with subjective descriptions of his patients’ skin that border on
the salacious. Like the editors of Sun Bathing Review, Bernhard
attempted to take the moral high ground – writing that ‘sunning also must
never contravene the rules of decorum’112 – yet images and interjections of deeply
sexualised suntanned skin betray his firm conviction.

In Figure 5.15, a healed female
patient’s bronzed skin positively glistens. At the age of twenty, this
patient entered Bernhard’s care emaciated and with ‘sagging, loose skin’,
presenting tubercular fistulae of the cervical glands as well as osteitis of
the lower jaw and right foot, the latter also resulting in fistulae. Within
eight months, she was transformed by heliotherapy; ten kilos heavier and
fully healed, the caption proclaimed her in an ‘excellent state of health’.
It concluded: ‘Revel in these recovered lush and beautifully modelled curves
of the body and the smooth, stunning bronze-coloured skin.’113 Bernhard read his
patient’s health by her aesthetic lines, surface texture, and colouring,
like an art connoisseur analysing a painted nude. The figure’s position in
the photograph allows for both the right side of her lower jaw and her right
foot to be visible in one frame, the white markings indicating cicatrised
tissue and thus closing of the fistulae. It also retains patient anonymity,
her face turned away from the lens, like Tudor-Hart’s model. Yet, while
composed for clinical observation, as an effective ‘after’ image, the
photograph equally presents to us a modern bronzed odalisque or Venus au
soleil like Park and Gregory’s photograph (Fig.
5.14), the viewer’s eye immediately drawn to
the figure’s pronounced conical breasts and lithe form.

In Figure 5.16, the photographer
(perhaps Bernhard himself) artfully arranged a twenty-four-year-old female
patient atop a bed on his sanatorium’s terrace, with a dramatic backdrop of
surrounding mountains and valleys. Turned onto her side, legs crossed, and a
scarf over her head that conspicuously ensures anonymity, the patient offers
an obscured view of her (unnecessarily) bare buttocks, twisted tantalisingly
towards the camera. The point, surely, is to examine the plaster cast
containing her back and torso, and the small window cut out from it to allow
the sunlight to penetrate a lesion below. The caption explained she suffered
from inflammation of the thoracic vertebrae (spondylitis dorsalis) and of
the bones (osteitis), presenting fistulae in the sternum and the left
clavicle. Bernhard concluded that after two years of heliotherapy, this
patient had become the ‘mother of healthy children’. Significantly, here he
proclaimed her return to health not through the healing of the lesions,
weight gain, blood tests, or mobility, but specifically through her ability
to procreate.

Like Lawrence’s Juliet, Bernhard’s patients regenerated their
bodies by submission to the sunshine. The intensity of pigmentation in Figure 5.15, whether actual or produced by the
lighting techniques, developing process, or retouching, is made extreme.
White contouring was added along the figure’s face, either to aid anonymity
or to heighten the contrast between skin and surroundings – an effect
calling to mind the illustrated figures whose pigmented bodies are marked by
white contours, in the advertisements by Jacomo and Wigglesworth (Plates
6–7). Like Park and Gregory, Bernhard ‘revelled’ in this degree of
pigmentation, the tone of his language and his photographs suggesting he
found heliotherapy’s efficacy for his patients aesthetically and even
sexually stimulating.

He was not alone among practitioners to do so. Frequent
references to suntanned skin as ‘beautified’, ‘delicate’, and simultaneously
both softer and firmer to the touch occur in physicians’ texts
internationally.114
Its appeal to tactility – calling out to the physician to touch it – can
also be detected, as Saleeby was wont to do (above). So too was exposure to
sunlight conceptualised as an act of being touched, ‘massaged’ or ‘kissed’
by the sun.115 Flügel,
quoted earlier, waxed poetic about the erotic pleasure derived from
experiencing sunlight upon the skin, and there are references to light
therapy instigating not just a sense of well-being but actual
euphoria in patients.116 Rollier was compelled to warn his medical
colleagues by 1916 that patients had to be monitored to curb their ‘zeal’.
The intense joy was so seductive that, left unsupervised, they exposed
themselves for dangerously long time periods.117 But under appropriate surveillance,
patients submissive to treatment – to the authority of physician and to the
stimulating light itself – were rendered happy, compliant, and prone. The
visual complements of Lawrence’s Juliet, the nudes in Bernhard’s and Park
and Gregory’s photographs undergo the act of heliotherapy as one of willing
receptivity to the sun’s penetrating touch and
procreative energy, to be impregnated with and by light (Figs. 5.14–5.16).

‘Bright’ babies and virile soldiers

Up to this point I have concentrated
on light therapy’s engagement with women and its visual and literary
rhetoric of producing healthy mother-citizens – exposing its deeply
sexualised undertones in the process – to begin contextualising the
therapy’s larger social aims and proclaimed national usefulness.

But let us not forget the toddlers and babies imaged in the
‘Homesun’ pamphlet (Plates 2–3, 5). The sheer quantity of visual and textual
material about child patients evinces that they were the therapy’s major
target group.118 Children
were the subjects of, and subject to, multiple large-scale trials about
light therapy, carried out by Hill, Gauvain, Colebrook, and many others,
during its early development and heyday.119 Rollier’s Leysin sanatoria, Gauvain’s sanatoria
in Hampshire, and the numerous infant-welfare clinics in urban areas
throughout Britain (and internationally) – these institutions first and
foremost treated children, curatively and preventively, especially for forms
of tuberculosis and for rickets.120

Mental health was also believed to benefit from light
treatment. Practitioners spoke of restored ‘brightness’ in children’s
dispositions and cognitive functioning, and young children were irradiated,
in clinics and at home, to treat ‘backwardness’.121 Dora Colebrook, undertaking research
at the North Islington Infant Welfare Centre supported by the London County
Council, mentioned ‘brighter’ babies and children as but one beneficial side
effect of irradiation.122
A trial on child patients at Treloar’s showed their advanced mental activity
in comparison to ‘physically defective’ London children, and Gauvain
suggested this could be attributed to ultraviolet radiation’s improvement of
‘the nutrition of the grey matter of the brain’.123 ‘The bright eyes, bronzed skin, and
firm flesh’ of Gauvain’s child patients were remarked upon by visitors.124 These valuable
future citizens externalised their ‘brightness’ by being happier and
smarter following irradiation. It makes the representation of the toddler in
the ‘Homesun’ pamphlet especially poignant, with his rascally smile and
engaging, direct gaze with the viewer: his photogenic body, his ‘glow’ or
‘brightness’, is a sign of both mental and physical health (Plate 3).

Like women, children were considered to be particularly
responsive to ultraviolet radiation. In this respect they were frequently
compared to plants and animals, finding their natural home outdoors in the
fresh air and sunlight.125 Treloar’s ambulant child patients were commonly
photographed in the Hampshire countryside and coast (Figs.
1.9–1.11, 5.17). Figure
5.17 depicts children undergoing heliotherapy while picking flowers,
making an overt association between the tanned skin of Treloar’s young
patients and the lush green vegetation surrounding them. The children were
here in their ‘natural’ place, healing and growing
in the sunshine like Alton’s wild flowers. The image is reminiscent of
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911): the protagonists
Mary and Colin, once ill-tempered and sickly-looking children, gradually
regain their health as they experience the rejuvenating powers of fresh air
and sunlight. The vital connections made throughout the novel between the
health and growth of the children and the secret garden find significant
resonance within light therapy as well as naturist literature.126

Yet there was controversy over the particular
photosensitivity of children’s skin. Such authorities as Hill, Eidinow, and
Hamilton reported in the mid-1920s that children under three were apparently
less sensitive to ultraviolet light than adults, showing milder
erythematic reactions.127
Other contemporaries, like the Russells, stated the opposite, and
significantly this was the medical opinion disseminated to the public.128 Articles in The
Times and Sunlight warned parents of the dangers of exposing
their children to the sunshine – not with intention of stopping them from doing it, however, only advocating that adults and
children alike do so gradually, building up a ‘healthy tanned skin’
incrementally, in the manner of Rollier’s method (see Chapter 2).129

All of these benefits, physical, and mental, held political
significance for a nation desirous of producing future ‘A1’ citizens from a
current ‘C3’ population during the interwar period. As Roger Cooter
explained, ‘by the 1920s child health and welfare was not only medicalized,
it was serving as a powerful argument for extending the role of the state in
health and welfare generally’.130 In Deck’s 1926 popular treatise (itself intended
to promote and solicit funds for the Sunlight League), Colebrook’s North
Islington Infant Welfare Centre was praised exuberantly for its targeted
treatment of ‘thousands of slum children’, transforming each one into an
‘entirely new being’:

Cases of malnutrition, rickets, general debility
and many forms of – so-called – nervous diseases have been treated
in this way and the result is an immediate improvement in
appearance, activity, appetite, weight, etc., and instead of these
children becoming chronic invalids and filling our hospitals and
institutions, they have a chance of developing into strong, healthy
boys and girls, capable of employment and able to play their part in
the battle of life.131

Three years
later, Dane echoed that it was a parental responsibility to expose children,
both curatively and preventively, to the sunlight on behalf of the
degenerating, ‘C3’ nation: ‘Decide that you will be part of this scheme,
that your children will be A1 specimens.’132 In clinics, young children were first introduced
to lamps by being placed on their mothers’ laps to help allay fears, gain
confidence, and ensure compliance.133 Mothers thus continued to play a central role in
the treatment of children, nurturing and guiding these young, valuable
citizens towards the light.

One of the first acts of the Sunlight League (f. 1924) was
the organisation of heliotherapy facilities for children at Kenwood
(Hampstead). Over the summer, thirty-five children, sent from ‘schools for
the physically defective’ and from hospitals, were monitored by a medical
committee and photographed.134 Before opening the Institute of Ray Therapy in
1930, Beaumont oversaw the children here. By 1925, he was also the honorary
medical superintendent of another Sunlight League project, the Municipal
Sunlight Clinic in St Pancras. The latter, when it opened its doors in March
1925, was partly funded by the Save the Children Fund and was
enthusiastically described in The Times as London’s first clinic for
artificial light therapy, operating out of an infant-welfare centre in
Highgate. The child patients were referred for treatment via the ten
infant-welfare centres in the borough of St Pancras, under the authority of
its medical officer of health.135 Other boroughs quickly followed suit, and by 1931 Beaumont declared that ‘now clinics are springing up
all over the country’.136

Many of the leading members of the league and the New Health
Society (formed out of the People’s League of Health), including Sir Alfred
Fripp and Hill, wanted natural and artificial light-therapy facilities
available not only in clinics or in hospitals, but in every school. Hill
suggested that carbon arc lamps be operated in schools by teachers, nurses,
or other suitably ‘skilled attendants’, while ultraviolet-permitting ‘Vita’
glass replaced the school’s ordinary glass windows.137 Like the animals at the London Zoo,
where lamps and ‘Vita’ glass windows were first experimentally installed,
the children received natural and artificial exposures to vitalising
ultraviolet rays, safely housed and supervised. As John Stanislav Sadar
argued, by installing ultraviolet-permitting glass into British homes, zoos,
and schools, these structures were themselves transformed, becoming
‘heliotherapeutic devices’.138 ‘Vita’ glass is but one example of new material
products, alongside Celanese fabric, sunscreen, and home-use lamps (termed
‘socio-technical artefacts’ by Simon Carter) that facilitated public access
to ultraviolet radiation beyond the light clinic or the trip to the beach or
lido. Carter, Sadar, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska also made clear that
these public measures, driven by groups like the Sunlight League, altered
widespread attitudes towards ultraviolet radiation (and sunlight generally)
during the 1920s into a natural, powerful source of preventive care for the
individual and nation.139
As Deck described, ultraviolet radiation was producing ‘entirely new
beings’, resistant to the degenerative influences and diseases of modern
life, and was thus a weapon of social hygiene. It cut across class lines
too: natural and artificial sunlight was enthusiastically aimed onto rich
and poor alike, curatively and preventively, via local free and private
clinics, hospitals, schools (especially open-air schools, enthusiastically
promoted by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis),
outdoor parks and lidos, beaches, and home-use lamps.140

In the words of Bernhard, reflecting on his extensive
experience utilising natural sunlight: ‘Air and sun had not only
strengthened the body and provided it with weapons for a victorious fight
with the infecting organism, but in this victory had armed it with immune
bodies for future protection.’141 To this end, alongside mothers and children,
soldiers and athletes were further target groups for curative and preventive
exposures, couched in a rhetoric of sexualised potency and military
efficiency. Both heliotherapy and phototherapy were used during the First
World War, especially to treat wounds, by British, French, Swiss, and German
physicians. Ultraviolet light was additionally relied upon to sterilise
water and for signalling purposes.142 The war proved an unparalleled testing ground
for applications of light, just as it did for other forms of modern
medicine, and this was surely one of the reasons why light therapy emerged
with such force during the 1920s and why it continued to be valued as a
treatment during the Second World War.143 Beaumont reported an enthusiastic new influx of relatively healthy young men at the
Institute for Ray Therapy in the summer of 1939, seeking to fix minor pains,
acne, and low energy levels so as to avoid any chance of being turned down
for service.144

The Swiss physicians Bernhard and Rollier undertook
pioneering work during the First World War and wrote about their
experiences, no doubt facilitated by their nation’s neutrality. In their
publications they deferred to the work of French and German colleagues in
equal measure.145
Bernhard used natural and artificial light to treat wounded German soldiers
in 1914–15, then from 1916–17 acted as Swiss military surgeon to war
prisoners’ camps in Germany, Britain, and northern France. Like Rollier, he
brought back cases to intern in Switzerland at his facilities, which
occurred until the end of the war and beyond it. Rollier discussed
heliotherapy for war wounds in Le Pansement solaire (1916). He argued
that heliotherapy healed wounds and maintained joint and muscle functions to
the affected areas, rendering injured soldiers once again fit for work and
ready for the ‘battle for existence’. This is why he described heliotherapy
as a ‘conservative’ treatment, which avoided unnecessary amputations. He
also cited it could aid surgical and orthopaedic therapy as well as plastic
surgery.146 Rollier
concluded the text by discussing the preventive use of heliotherapy in
future military training, arming young soldiers with additional resistance
to infections, chief among them tuberculosis.147

In Britain, phototherapy was used to treat wounded soldiers
in Oxford, Newcastle, and London and at naval hospitals in Chatham and
Haslar, while heliotherapy was used in Maidenhead under the direction of the
Canadian Red Cross.148
The Simpson lamp, discussed in Chapter 4, was one
particular model used to treat soldiers at London hospitals such as St
Bartholomew’s, not only for wounds but also for venereal lesions.
Ultraviolet light was particularly prized as a bactericide, naturally
disinfecting wounds, as well as for its ability to induce suppuration, expel
necrotic bone and tissue, and increase blood flow to speed healing. It also
produced much more aesthetically appealing scar tissue (cicatrisation).
Soldiers’ bodies were not only healed, they remained whole by avoiding the
surgeon’s knife, and thus they could retain their status as valued and
productive citizens during and after the war.

Like the soldier, the athlete found his body – and his
masculinity – a special target of ultraviolet radiation. Athletes were
advised to expose themselves to the ‘Homesun’ lamp in Hanovia’s pamphlet to
counter ‘staleness’ through over-training, recharging lost energy and
increasing ‘vital capacity’. Hanovia also boasted its lamps were used by
professional footballers, a practice that was reported in local and national
newspapers to improve athletic performance by means of increased stamina and
general health. Among the clubs who used the technology were Northampton,
Hull City, Chelsea, West Ham, Leicester City, Sunderland, and Glasgow
Rangers.149 Hanovia
included an image of champion boxer Jack Petersen receiving a vitalising
exposure, his skin tinted a saturated orange like the other models’ and his
contours crisply outlined from heavy retouching. A
‘hardy’ tan, as Carter explained, made for a virile man, representing ‘a
visible link between the body, ideals of nature and masculinity’.150 Part of this process
involved ‘training’ the skin to ultraviolet radiation and all manner of
climatic conditions.

Hardening the body ensured increased virility for the truly
fit man. Those who worked sedentary occupations and stayed chiefly indoors
were, according to Hill, doomed to a ‘loss of breeding power’.151 The statement is not
surprising. As we have seen already, one of Hill’s major arguments for
regular exposures to ultraviolet radiation was that it increased the sexual
power of citizens (see epigraph). This overt sexualisation of ultraviolet
radiation, of its procreative powers and production of aesthetically
desirable pigmentation, appears on the surface to have had overt eugenic
ends: photogenic, procreative, and physically fit women and men meant ideal
‘race mothers’, A1 soldiers, and resultant ‘bright’, healthy babies.
Significantly, Hill lectured widely throughout Britain using visual aids to
make direct contrasts between sun-fed and sun-starved bodies to public
audiences. In one lecture given in Leeds in 1926, he showed an image of a
Graeco-Roman statue and contrasted the ‘almost perfect body’ – achieved
through bodily exposure to fresh air and sunlight by practising sport in the
open – to that of a ‘C3 man of today’ with a ‘malformed chest’, ‘contracted
jaws’, and a ‘badly developed’ nose. Hill then further contrasted the image
of the ‘C3’ individual to that of a contemporary young German, bronzed like
a statue through naked outdoor exercise.152 During a time of heightened eugenic fervour, the
suntan gained unparalleled social and political value in Britain and abroad.
It is no coincidence, in other words, that during the first forty years of
the twentieth century, when eugenics developed as a legitimate study of
racial improvement throughout the globe, the suntan was celebrated as a sign
of health and beauty. Indeed, it is precisely as an aesthetic that
the suntanned body held value, particularly for eugenicists like Saleeby.
That the ‘Homesun’ pamphlet was produced at the opening of the Second World
War in colour is significant; its representations of coated, smiling
models have (socio-political) value by virtue of being coloured.153 But equally
important here is the colour value, the use of a highly saturated
orange that borders on Technicolor. The values of suntan in eugenicists’
minds were slippery at best, positioned precariously on what might be
understood as a sliding (colour) scale, (evolutionary) ladder, or (moral)
compass. Suntan’s function, duration, and depth could simultaneously signal
the white, British body’s renewed racial health and its impending
degeneration.

Saturated colour

Compare the ‘Homesun’ cover, a colour
photograph (Plate 3), to the retouched and tinted
black-and-white images in the rest of the pamphlet (Plates 2, 4–5). It is
clear that, in the printing process, Hanovia tried very hard to replicate
the colour tones of the models’ tanned skin in Plate 3 to represent users’ skin in the
black-and-white images, however non-naturalistic the end results. Are we to
read these coatings of colour as ‘bronzed’, ‘golden brown’ tans? The
fluorescent colour value borders on the radioactive. Despite the use of
highlighting in some of the figures’ bodies (e.g., Plate
4), we have less sense that it is an externalised reflection
(‘shine’) than an interiorised projection of light (‘glow’).154 The common
description of a ‘glowing’ or ‘radiant’ tan is fitting; pigmentation was
perceived to be a manifestation of bodily photogenesis. Visually the colour
orange is used consistently, and uniquely, throughout the pamphlet. In
varying values it is used along the borders, for the titles of sub-sections,
behind offset text as image captions, and most importantly to represent
highly stylised suns. In Plate 4, for example, the
bold orange of the sun (used also for the model’s hair and swimsuit in the
‘outdoor’ scene) is echoed in subdued values for skin, towel, and sand, then
transported and mimicked below in the tanned skin of the model taking her
‘Homesun’ bath. A connection is made visually between the photogenic sun and
the photogenic body, through colour alone. The sun’s vital energy is
transferred to, consumed, and stored by the model, and likewise the lamp’s
ultraviolet emanations are meant to impart equal, if not superior, power.
The models are saturated by ultraviolet radiation, and this is expressed
through saturated colour reminiscent of contemporaneous Technicolor films –
representations that, according to Sarah Street and Tom Gunning, likewise
struggled to successfully exploit colour as simultaneously naturalistic, or
true to nature, and spectacular.155

An extreme colour choice, the orange in the ‘Homesun’
pamphlet is applied as a top coat to black-and-white skin, overlaid in the
final stages of the printing process. It appears more like the artifice of
make-up (Plate 5) than the deeply ingrained pigment
embedded in the colour photograph (Plate 3). We might
today liken it to the orange disaster that is the fake tan, an obvious,
applied surface coat or mask that is not easily confused with the natural
pigmentation of ‘black’ skin. It is a borrowing, mimicry, or even attempt at
racial ‘passing’ gone wrong, provoking anxiety or ridicule.156

For early twentieth-century practitioners, patients, and
naturists, similar anxiety resided in uneven colour complexion, especially
the tanning of the face; in other words, in an even, convincing and total
coverage that could enable – or disrupt – racial categorisation.157 In Baumer’s 1936
Punch cartoon, the alarm we are meant to read humorously on the
face of the sunbathing initiate as she stares at her dark companion is
significant (Fig. 5.2). She is alarmed because she
witnesses a disruption of racial difference in her companions, in spite of
the fact that their dark bodies retain the physiognomic facial
characteristics of ideal British ‘whiteness’: pert nose, thin lips, small
chin, and high cheekbones and forehead. The viewer knows the tanned
bodies are ‘white’ but sees them as ‘black’. Furthermore, her alarm
can be read as fear for her own body, her own sense of self. As the caption
stated, the same transformation would soon happen to
the initiate’s own white skin, and rapidly so, should she conquer her fears
and give in to the pressure from her fashionable peers.

For David Batchelor, colour itself is feared and marginalised
as trivial, as artifice, as ‘other’, and has been so throughout the history
of Western civilisation, particularly in relation to art and architecture.
He termed this ‘chromophobia’, describing the prejudice against colour as
operating in two ways:

In the first, colour is made out to be the
property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the
oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the
pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the
superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In
one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the
other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience,
and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or
it is trivial, or it is both.158

Significantly, Batchelor argued its opposite, ‘chromophilia’, simply
celebrates and even heightens these perceptions, much as early
twentieth-century primitivism and ‘negrophilia’ revelled in so-called
‘primitive’ or ‘black’ aesthetics, fundamentally fuelling, rather than
challenging, normalised perceptions of racial difference.159 In Baumer’s cartoon, the tan is
simultaneously the source of negrophilic desire and negrophobic
alarm. He playfully references the contemporaneous comedy of ‘blackface’
minstrelsy, yet takes a step too far – the pigmentation is too totalising,
too deep. It is acquired pigmentation (colour) that curiously is represented
as trendy, sexualising, trivial (hence humorous), and dangerous, all at the
same time.

Such ambivalence resides in medical and popular
understandings of suntan with respect to its depth and its permanence.
Descriptions of suntan as a mere surface marker, residing only temporarily
on the surface, occur frequently. A ‘coat’ or ‘mask’ to be worn and shed at
will by white patients and enthusiasts, the tan finds analogy with cosmetics
and clothing, and certainly as a shield or ‘screen’ demonstrated its
protective function. Thedering described the tan as a ‘coat of armour’ for
the body, for instance, while the National Association for the Prevention of
Tuberculosis described children’s bronzed skin as a ‘natural clothing’ in
their 1921 film, Air and Sun.160 Beyond the pith helmet (solar topi), clothing
designed specially for British travellers to the tropics mimicked ‘black’
skin. Ryan Johnson pointed out that, paradoxically, in doing so:

‘Black’ skin, the very characteristic that most
obviously marked difference between colonizers and colonized and
which was a source of so much racist commentary in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was also the very quality that British men and women sought to imitate
while living in the tropical colonies.161

Adopting the
natural state of the ‘savage’, colonisers wrapped themselves in manufactured
tropical ‘skin’ as a means of protecting their vulnerable bodies against
disease, degeneration, and the descent towards savagery itself. For Johnson,
this paradox ‘unmasks the close connections that still existed between
colonizers [white] and colonized [coloured], rather than a growing divide
between the two’.162
Carter likewise pointed out the transgressing of boundaries between the two
was carried out physically through their perceived ‘deviant’ sexual contact;
that is, through racial miscegenation.163

Far more radically than in Baumer’s cartoon, the collapsing
of distinction between ‘white’ and ‘coloured’, light and dark, takes place
in the case of solarised photographs (Chapter 3). By
the 1930s, infrared photography opened up another world, a world of strange
reversals of light and dark in which pale skin appeared ‘black’ and vice
versa, reminiscent of Man Ray’s positive and negative versions of Noire
et blanche (Kiki [Alice Prin] with an African mask) (1926).164 It is, by means of
multiple light exposures, saturation gone too deep, confounding the
racialised distinctions between ‘white’ model and ‘primitive’ mask, and
furthermore rendering Kiki as dangerously seductive as Baumer’s smoking
negrophiliac (Fig. 5.2).

Transgressive tans

Discussing the tensions between
‘racial colour’ and ‘tanned colour’, Sarah Ahmed asserted that, in early
twentieth-century tourism literature, ‘The perfectibility of “tanned skin”
remains bound up with notions of hygiene. Tanned colour is clean colour and
is hence immediately distinguished from the infectability of being-Black’.165 Along with fresh
air, clean water, and open spaces, sunlight was promoted by advocates as
part of a natural regime for bodily health and social hygiene. Saleeby and
his Sunlight League perceived sunlight, and ultraviolet light specifically,
as a disinfecting agent with which to rid the masses of ‘diseases of
darkness’, notably tuberculosis and rickets. He lobbied for strict smoke
abatement laws to reduce the fog and grime hanging over London and other
major British industrial cities, seeking to exchange the nation’s dependence
upon coal for electricity. Eradicating slums, building lidos, and
irradiating children were Saleeby’s aims, in keeping with his belief in
positive eugenics.166
Ahmed’s framing of the tan and race in relation to hygiene is therefore apt
since, for promoters like Saleeby, ultraviolet light acted not unlike soap
as a weapon for racial health. Advertisements for ‘ultraviolet ray soap’
present a fascinating fusion of these two consumable products.167 As Anne McClintock
so convincingly argued, the promise of racial regeneration, maintenance, and
cleansing through the fetishistic use of soap was part
and parcel of the Empire’s civilising mission. Yet in Victorian and
Edwardian advertisements of ‘blacks’ turned ‘white’ through its miraculous
cleansing action, soap, like ultraviolet light, could be perceived as an
agent actively maintaining or disrupting racial difference.168

Sally Dunne Romano asserted that, ‘At the start of the
twentieth century, the healthy suntan did not endanger native-born, white
skinned Americans’ racial identity because, as opposed to the permanency of
race, a suntan was temporary.’169 Anxieties over the ‘infectability’ (to quote
Ahmed) of racial transformation through light exposure apparently did not
threaten predominant, Darwinist understandings of ‘fixed’ characteristics of
race and identity in twentieth-century America. Yet Man Ray’s 1926
photograph of Kiki and the controversial book, The Effects of Tropical
Light on White Men, by Major Charles Woodruff of 1905, complicate
Dunne Romano’s argument.170 However much some practitioners viewed the tan as
‘merely’ a temporary surface coat, there were others not entirely certain of
its latent effects on the body and the psyche. We find them in Britain as
well as America, Denmark, France, Germany, and Switzerland. As discussed
earlier, the depth and function of the tan were perceived to reach well into
the body’s interior by many international practitioners. They were also
unclear just how temporary the tan was. Again, explanation resided in the
skin of the ‘coloured’ body, Müller writing:

If during summer you have acquired a pretty tanned
skin all over, it will almost fade before next season, though not
quite. You will keep a light shade of tanning, and when you again
start sun-bathing, you will find that now you can stand practically
any amount of sunshine without the ill-effects [e.g., erythema] so
characteristic for beginners. The cause is that your skin has formed
its own means of protection by creating a sort of pigment. We find
similar pigments as an inherited gift in most other human races,
from the light yellow of the Japanese to the ebony black of the real
Negro.171

For Müller,
retaining pigment, described here as a process of adaptation more in
keeping with Neo-Lamarckian thought, was considered a positive outcome of
regular exposure to the natural environment. But he too expressed concern
over sunlight’s lasting effects, especially on young, impressionable bodies.
Müller’s English version of My Sun-Bathing and Fresh Air System
(1927) included warnings about sunbathing being dangerous if overdone. His
reason was that ‘the sex life is awakened too soon in children by too much
sun-bathing’.172 This
is reminiscent of Revillet’s comment, stated above, when he discussed young
females induced into early puberty by the Côte d’Azur’s sunlight and felt
the need to stress this was not an ‘atavistic’ phenomenon. The tanned body’s
perceived descent towards atavism, immorality, and base sexuality correlated
with the colour depth (value) of pigmentation: the ‘deeper’ the tan, the greater the possibility of irreversibly crossing racial
lines. But even here light therapists, many of them eugenicists, sought out
extreme pigmentation for their weakly, white-skinned patients.

Of the many foreign physicians visiting Rollier’s facilities
in Leysin, the French Dr Renon commented in 1913 that,

I was extremely impressed to see patients as
black as Negroes, with considerable and multiple healed
tubercular wounds and with healed white tumours [tumours of chronic
tubercular arthritis]; without the photographs of the lesions before
the treatment, never would it have been possible to believe that the
same disorders existed beforehand.173

For Renon,
the confounding of patients’ racial identity through intense heliotherapy
was impressive work indeed. The American Dr Otis similarly commented, upon
visiting Rollier’s facilities in 1912 that, ‘It was difficult to tell to
what race they [the children] belonged, they were so pigmented, the majority
being a mahogany or chocolate colour.’174 In Britain, Dane commented in his 1929 popular
book that ‘a [naturally] dark Englishman will soon become quite as dark as
an Arab and even darker in many cases.’175

As Maren Möhring discussed, in Germany extreme pigmentation
was discussed at length by sunbathers ascribing to the Nachtkultur
(naked culture) movement. In the process of bronzing one’s skin:

The ideal skin color was a nevertheless a moderate
bronze, for the sunbather was warned against excessive tanning that
might make his or her body ‘look like a Hottentot’s body’. The dark
skin of the ‘Hottentot’ was considered as the embodiment of the ugly
and as the effect of layers of dirt. Since skin color was one of the
most important racial signifiers in theories of race circulating in
the early twentieth century, the shade of one’s tan became a
controversial point. Ongoing efforts to define a ‘healthy brown’ or
a ‘natural white’ make apparent the ambiguity and permeability of
the category of whiteness.176

Here then
was that tricky border between looking like an ‘Arab’, ‘Negro’, or
‘Hottentot’ – for the white, sick patient or lay enthusiast an act of
emulation through which to regain vigour, health, and sexual function – and
becoming one, namely an act of total racial transformation.
Bernard attempted to stabilise these fears by arguing that the differences
lay within the minute depths of the skin’s physiological make-up: ‘Acquired
pigment is extracellular, as opposed to the normal pigment, which is
intracellular, as for example the colouring matter of the negro, which must
afford constant protection against light.’177 Awash with uncertainty and
contradiction, he also stated in the same work that
racial colour was not fixed, or even inherited. Rather, it was his view that
the ability to ‘manufacture and store pigment in the skin under the
influence of light’ was passed on from generation to generation, not the
pigment itself.178

Under the seductive pull of negrophilia, others collapsed the
distinction between acquired and inherited pigment altogether, speaking of
the black body as representative of the healthy, deep tan. In The
Times’ ‘Sunlight and Health’ supplement of 1928, for instance, one
correspondent stated:

From the earliest times Africa has been for the
people of Europe a synonym for sunshine. Everything and everybody
African were sunburned till they were black; and by the mere action
of the sun life there bred innumerably; a land of mystery and
multitudinous strange gods all drawing their own existences from the
life-given power of the supreme sun-god himself.179

Such
conflations fed back into light-therapy practice, driving some to alter
their methods. By the late 1930s, the issue of excessive pigmentation led Dr
Charles Brody, the husband of Dr Malvine Brody, to address the matter
directly and methodically in his practice. In his massive, internationally
authored edited series, Traité d’hélio- et d’actinologie (1938), he
included an essay on a new method to depigment his patients. He began
by complaining that tanning had become too fashionable among tourists as
well as patients in heliotherapeutic sanatoria on the Côte d’Azur, an
indirect reference perhaps to the sudden rise in numbers to the region as a
result of the newly instigated law that allocated paid holiday leave for
workers in 1936, les congés payés. For these tourists, Brody wrote,
tanning had become the goal of sun treatment rather than merely a product of
it.180 He promoted a
new method of his design involving a depigmentation process at certain
intervals during heliotherapy treatment so that his patients slowly weaned
themselves off of sunshine. The reason, he stated, was that long,
uninterrupted sunbathing, with the intention of producing extreme tans, was
unnecessary to the healing process and even dangerous:

It can even happen that the appearance of a sudden
and intense pigmentation is the element of a severe prognosis and,
sometimes even, the prodrome of a fatal, short-term outcome. Such is
the case with sufferers of cachexia [general wasting disease]. Here
we have noted that after a short exposure, even in an insignificant
dose, a sudden and intense pigmentation of chocolate colour appears.
Far from being a good omen, here this rapid and dark pigmentation
signifies a tissular disintegration of the organism on the path to
destruction and is comparable, for us, to a warning sign.181

In fact, he
described pigmentation as a skin ‘allergy’, and viewed excessive tanning as
the body overdosed and saturated by the sun; he wrote of
‘surpigmentation, surdosage, sursaturation solaire’ necessitating
not simply depigmentation but désaccoutumance, the word
accoutumance significantly meaning either ‘adaptation’ or
‘addiction’.182 By
shortening exposure times and assuring the well-being of his patients, Brody
insisted that the advantages would be economic as well as social and
moral.183

Already by the 1920s, however, Thedering described a similar
method designed to overcome what he termed the ‘dead end’ of light treatment
on patients. Intense, continuous exposures produced excessive pigmentation –
Thedering’s ‘coat of armour’ – and inhibited further progress. The
practitioner could deliberately choose to expose his patients until this
plateau was reached, followed by several weeks without treatment for the
body to ‘rid itself of the excess pigment’, then start again, creating
cycles of ‘dead ends’ and recoveries.184 In Beaumont’s 1931 handbook, he called this the
‘dead point’ method, a particularly fitting phrase that, as I discuss in Chapter 6, aligned excessive light exposure with the
dangers of racial degeneration, damage, and death.185

Conclusion

Though Thedering attempted intensely
pigmenting, then depigmenting, his patients, he noted that a much preferred
method was to give shorter exposures throughout the cure, avoiding
pigmentation altogether and ensuring the skin’s receptivity to the light. As
discussed in Chapter 2, this was the method advocated
by Hill and Eidinow at the MRC-funded NIMR, at least for patients when
curatively applied. Yet, when it came to the tan’s preventive merits on the
British population at large, Hill simultaneously praised the nudist
practices made so well known by Müller and his rival, the German Hans Surén.
The latter’s book, Man and Sunlight (Der Mensch und die Sonne
of 1924, with a 1927 English translation for which Saleeby wrote the
foreword), promoted intense sunbathing as part of the physical-culture
movement and was later accepted party propaganda during the Nazi regime (see
Fig. 1.1).186

Earlier, it inspired British poet and writer Alfred Noyes’
playful novel, The Return of the Scare-Crow (The Sun Cure;
1929). Noyes’ novel addressed the joys, and ridiculousness, of the cult of
nudity through the story of a normally straight-laced pastor who
accidentally loses his clothing during a spontaneous sunbathing session
along the Sussex coast. As a result he spends several days in hiding to
avoid the scandal of being seen while simultaneously revelling in the
delights of his new-found freedom, constantly nude in the sunshine.
Describing Surén’s book as replete with photographs of Germans so tanned
they appeared to be ‘South Sea Islanders’, the novel makes explicit
connections between the act of sunbathing and primitivist longings for
exotic islands, jungles, and childhood innocence.187 Most of all, Noyes’ protagonist, the
reverend Basil Strode, experiences the pleasures
and perils of loosening moral standards accompanying the invigorating sun
cure.

If tanned skin was, according to Ahmed, historically
perceived as ‘clean colour’, we must recognise that the ‘infectability’ of
blackness – of degenerative racial ‘contagion’ or transgression – was
uncomfortably close on the colour scale, always threatening to bleed. It is
perhaps deliberate that Hanovia sought to represent its photogenic,
‘bronzed’ models using gradations of orange rather than brown, signalling
the transference of solar energy instead of race (Plates 2–5). Health,
happiness, and procreativity sought after by saturating the body with
ultraviolet radiation could easily descend into the realm of disease,
deviance, and degeneration. The value that Hill attributed to ultraviolet
radiation, and its resultant tan, to stimulate the ‘sexual power of
citizens’ (see epigraph), was thus at once eugenically desirable and
dangerous.188

Practitioners’ perceptions about the ultraviolet rays’
sexually activating powers set it apart from X rays and radium, known by
contrast for their sterilising action on the reproductive organs – used to
horrific, eugenic effect on so-called ‘degenerative’ groups around the
globe.189 But the
investment in ultraviolet radiation to produce photogenic bodies, however
promising, was never uniformly understood as a ‘positive’ eugenic measure.
It is crucial we recognise that, first, the matter was never fully resolved
and, second, this ambivalence towards the tan was bound up with sex, race,
and national health.

Lastly, to view the tan as ‘only’ an aesthetic is to overlook
the power of the visual. It was precisely on the surface that its ‘value’
was, however ambivalently, understood. Even when conceptualised as a surface
layer or coating of colour, its meaning was always more than skin-deep. In
early twentieth-century Britain and abroad, the tan was perceived as the
externalisation of stored solar energy in the body, of vital energy radiant
and glowing. Presented in the full glory of saturated colour, the smiling
mother and child in the ‘Homesun’ cover delight and disarm us (Plate 3). Yet their curious pigmentation remains
unfixed along a slippery colour scale, revealing that seeking a suntan could
go either way on the evolutionary ladder.

4Dane’s credentials were suspect, being implicated in
a patient’s death; see ‘Jury and Nature Cure Practitioner’, The
Times, 14 March 1931, p. 3; and ‘Fatal Nature Cure’, Western
Morning News and Mercury, 14 March 1931, p. 9.

5Leonard Hill, Sunshine and Open Air: Their
Influence on Health, with Special Reference to the Alpine
Climate (London: Edward Arnold,
1925), pp. 124–5, and ‘Let Children Live in Sunshine! (By a Woman
Doctor)’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 28 May 1926, p. 5. See also Ina
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and
Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially pp.
151–92.

8On the New Health Society and the Sunlight League,
see Chapter 1, and John Stanislav Sadar,
‘Unpacking the Latent Bodies of Interwar Ultraviolet Health Glass’
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010), pp.
108–10.

9Hanovia, Get Back in the Sun with a
‘Homesun’, pamphlet, 1940 (Thackray Medical Museum, CAT HAN 1940
1088, S.2434/240), pp. 6–7. See also the ‘Homesun’ advertisement in
The Times, 12 October 1928, p. 9.

13See Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds),
Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. xiii–xix,
at p. xvii, and John Pickstone’s ‘Production, Community and Consumption:
The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Medicine’, in Roger Cooter
and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 2000), pp. 1–19.

19Jean-Antoine-Constant Lamaison, De
l’héliothérapie dans la tuberculose, medical dissertation (Bordeaux: Imprimerie Barthélemy & Clédes,
1913), p. 25. On the French Eugenics Society, see William Schneider,
‘Towards the Improvement of the Human Race: The History of
Eugenics in France’, Journal of Modern History, 54:2
(1982), 268–91; and William Schneider, ‘The Eugenics Movement in France,
1890–1940’, in Mark B. Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in
Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 69–109.

20Caleb W. Saleeby, Sunlight and Health (London: Nisbet & Co., 1923), pp. 20–1.
Schneider stated Saleeby was a neo-Lamarckian; see ‘Eugenics Movement in
France’, p. 75. Carter described Saleeby as ‘a “reformist” rather than a
“conservative” eugenicist’ because he did not subscribe to the ‘better
dead’ school of negative eugenics promoted by Sir Francis Galton; see
Carter, Rise and Shine, p. 73.

44Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How
Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The
Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. A.
Davies (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1995), p. 71; and Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor:
Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, 1990).

45Auguste Rollier, ‘The Share of the Sun in the
Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis’, BMJ, 21
October 1922, pp. 741–5, at p. 742.

49The glowing corpses of patients succumbing to
radiation overexposure are poignant examples of bodily photogenesis: on
the dial painters of the US Radium Corporation, see David I. Harvie,
Deadly Sunshine: The History and Fatal Legacy of Radium
(Stroud: Tempus, 2005), p. 172; on
Radiothor patients, see Matthew Lavine, The First Atomic Age:
Scientists, Radiations, and the American Public, 1895–1945
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
p. 150; on ‘Radiogenol’ patients, see Richard F. Mould, A Century of
X-Rays and Radioactivity in Medicine (Bristol and Philadelphia, Pa.: Institute of Physics
Publishing, 1993), p. 22; and on Thorotrast patients, see Bettyann
Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth
Century (Reading: Helix Books,
1998), p. 105. See also Chapter 4.

62Bold original. Edward J. Deck, The Sun and How to
Use It (London: Sunlight League,
1926), pp. 10–11. Hanovia’s Homesun pamphlet similarly stated,
‘We feed on plants raised in sunlight, or on animals reared on them –
for all flesh is grass, and all grass is sunlight’ (p. 2).

63‘All-electric farm’, Sunday Post, 4 September
1927, p. 17. Vegetables, fruits, and plants grown underground with ‘huge
ultra-violet ray lamps’ were reported to have grown better and quicker
than in natural sunlight in an underground garden at Cumberland Lodge,
Windsor Great Park, to the king and queen’s amazement. See ‘Nature
Cheated by the Ultra-violet Ray’, Western Daily Press, 26 May
1930, p. 7.

78Wilhelm Flaskamp, ‘Light and Heat Therapy in
Gynaecology’, Light and Heat in Therapy: The Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference on Light and Heat in Medicine and Surgery,
University of London, October–November 1928 (London: Actinic Press, 1929), pp. 20–37. On
p. 27 he also cited a precursor to the electric lamps by Engelhorn known
as the ‘vaginal lamp’, by which light, concentrated by lenses, was
brought into the vagina through a speculum – a literal ‘burning
mirror’/speculum as theorised by Luce Irigaray. See Melissa Miles,
The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly
Publishing, 2008).

79Sir Henry Gauvain, ‘Organisation and Work of a
Light Department in a Hospital for Surgical Tuberculosis’,
Lancet, 4 July 1925, pp. 10–16, at p. 14.

81Lavine, First Atomic Age, p. 10. Howell also
explained that physicians perceived women and babies easier to
radiograph than men since they had less blood circulating in their
bodies, and were thus easier to penetrate: Howell, Technology in the
Hospital, p. 146.

98J. C. Flügel, ‘The Psychology of Clothes’,
Sun Bathing Review, 1:2 (1933), 14–15; and Graham Richards,
‘Flügel, John Carl (1884–1955)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/60995 (accessed 20 November
2014). Flügel was one of many diverse luminaries who penned a letter to
The Times about nude sunbathing: The other signatories included Rollier, Gibbings, Julian Huxley, George
Bernard Shaw, writer and pacifist Vera Brittain, feminist and socialist
campaigner Countess Dora Russell (wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell),
and radiologist Alfred C. Jordan (founder of the Men’s Dress Reform
Party, a branch of the New Health Society and Sunlight League; see
Carter, Rise and Shine, pp. 78–9). See ‘Sun Bathing: Benefits of
Light and Air [letter to the Editor]’, The Times, 18 March 1932,
p. 10.

100 On ‘true’ sunbathing, in the eyes of the
nudist, versus ‘popular’ (partially clothed) sunbathing, see Alan
Warwick’s introduction in Bertram Park and Yvonne Gregory, Sun
Bathers (London: George Routledge
& Sons, Ltd, 1935), pp. vii–viii; and Thedering, Sunlight as
Healer, p. 54. On the naturist’s engagement with the
environment, see Nina J. Morris, ‘Naked in Nature: Naturism, Nature
and the Senses in Early 20th Century Britain’, Cultural
Geographies, 16:3 (2009), 283–308.

101 Gibbings’ cover was used for the first eight
issues. For an example of his written contributions, see ‘An Artist
Speaks on Sun Bathing’, Sun Bathing Review, 2:5 (1934), p. 10.
See also Martin J. Andrews, The Life and Work of Robert Gibbings
(Bicester: Primrose Hill Press, 2003),
pp. 176–8. Gibbings was cited briefly for taking over the Golden
Cockerel Press, in collaboration with Eric Gill (who also contributed to
the journal), in Frances Spalding, British Art since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), p.
71.

102 I wish to explore these images, and the
magazine as a whole, in a future research project on naturism, natural
therapies, and notions of ‘exposure’. In some cases genitalia is
violently scratched out in the reprinting process, presumably in order
to be ‘fit’ for view, necessitating lines be literally drawn to
distinguish ‘art’ from ‘pornography’. The cover models were
retouched/covered from winter 1943 (10:40). See also Shaffer, ‘On the
Environmental Nude’, pp. 131–2.

106 Saleeby’s writings were also included in
Sun Bathing Review: e.g., ‘Spreading the Light’, 2:5 (1934),
1–2; and he provided the foreword for Hans Surén’s Man and
Sunlight (Slough: Sollux, 1927). However, as editor of the
Sunlight League’s journal, Sunlight, Saleeby spoke of
disassociating the league’s aims from those of the ‘cult of nudity’
(Sunlight, 1:8 [1929], 7). Nonetheless, an advertisement and
enthusiastic article by Jordan about the Sun Bathing Society’s
activities were included in Sunlight (2:6 [1932], frontispiece
and pp. 187–91). See also Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the
Body, pp. 168, 300; Morris, ‘Naked in Nature’; and Worpole,
Here Comes the Sun, pp. 47–8.

107 Carter wrote, ‘the suntan is a visual symbol
for the consumption of others and is acquired within the gaze of others.
Originally the gaze was that of the approving medical professional but
now this medical gaze has been replaced with the self-reflexive
tourist’s own gaze.’ Rise and Shine, p. 103.

108 See the anonymous article on Gauvain,
‘Sunlight Treatment’, Sun Bathing Review, 3:11 (1935), 90–3.
Contributing to diverse venues, Tudor-Hart produced photographs for Pears Soap, ‘Humanised Trufood’, and Ovaltine
Rusks, as well as for photo-essays in Picture Post and
politically radical exhibitions such as the AIA (Artists International
Association, founded in 1933). See Val Williams, The Other Observers:
Women Photographers in Britain, 1900 to the Present (London: Virago Press, 1994), p. 129. For an
example, see the Trufood Ltd advertisement in The Times, 14
February 1936, p. 6.

110 Sheehan, Doctored, p. 96. Just like
light therapy, exposure times for nineteenth-century photographs were
similarly calculated according to the sitter’s colouring: the lighter
the skin, the shorter the exposure.

111 Warwick in Park and Gregory, Sun
Bathers, p. xii. Warwick was friends with Gibbings, the two
sunbathing together in Gibbings’ garden; see Andrews, Robert
Gibbings, p. 178.

115 See Russell and Russell, Ultra-violet
Radiation, p. 113. Part of light therapy’s appeal for lupus
vulgaris patients was its aesthetic effects, resulting in excellent scar
tissue, unlike previous treatments. See Finsen, Phototherapy, p.
71. Jamieson explained that lupus vulgaris was often confused with
syphilis, a disease known to be sexually transmitted and thus morally
charged; Anne Kinloch Jamieson, ‘An Intolerable Affliction: A History of
Lupus Vulgaris in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain’
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds, 2010), p. 47. Dane stated that
sunlight was used to treat syphilis in Sunlight Cure, pp. 40–1,
suggesting light could be both a source of sexual health and sexual
danger.

117 Rollier, Pansement solaire, p. 72.
The addictive nature of actinic light has been described more recently
as ‘tanorexia’, stimulating the body’s endorphins, dopamine, and
testosterone in men. See Hobday, Light Revolution, p. 35.

118 I discuss the subject of ‘exposing’ children
in light therapy’s history in a forthcoming publication with Natasha
McEnroe, associated with the Wellcome Trust-funded exhibition, ‘The Kiss
of Light’ (Florence Nightingale Museum, 2015). See also Chapter 1.

119 Regarding Hill see ‘The Ultra-violet Ray
… 400 Children in Test’, Nottingham Evening Post, 9
February 1931, p. 1; and Leonard Hill and J. Argyll Campbell,
‘Metabolism of Children Undergoing Open-Air Treatment,
Heliotherapy and Balneotherapy’, BMJ, 25 February 1922,
pp. 301–3. Regarding Colebrook, see Hill et al., ‘Discussion on
Influence of Sunlight’. Several trials involving children are listed in
Actinotherapy Technique (1943), pp. 96–8. See also the work
of Lederer: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America
before the Second World War (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995); ‘Orphans as Guinea Pigs: American Children and
Medical Experimenters, 1890–1930’, in Roger Cooter (ed.), In the Name
of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96–123; and
‘Children as Guinea Pigs: Historical Perspectives’, Accountability in
Research: Policies and Quality Assurance, 10:1 (2003),
1–16.

125 See also Linda Bryder, ‘“Wonderlands of
Buttercup, Clover and Daisies”: Tuberculosis and the Open-Air School
Movement in Britain, 1907–39’, in Roger Cooter (ed.), In the Name of
the Child, pp. 72–95, at p. 79.

126 Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret
Garden (London: William Heinemann,
1911). Many contemporaneous children’s novels celebrate children growing
in the fresh air and sunlight, including the early and influential
Heidi (1880). My thanks to Natasha McEnroe for this.

128 Russell and Russell, Ultra-violet
Radiation, p. 116. They specified: ‘Children can stand about
half the dose of an adult male of a similar type, and infants about half
that of children. Women are as a rule more sensitive than men, and
sensitiveness decreases as age increases’ (p. 150).

131 Deck, The Sun, p. 13. He further
singled out Treloar’s branches, the London Hospital, and the Heritage
Craft Schools at Chailey (about which the Wellcome Library has a rare
photographic album marking Rollier’s visit in 1924, ref. 680190i).
Vaughan-Cowell, who worked under Deck, reported he treated 400 patients
daily at the London Light Clinic. Deck stated it had the capacity to
treat 1,000 patients daily. See Vaughan-Cowell, Artificial
Sunlight, p. 50; and Edward J. Deck, ‘The London Clinic’,
Sunlight, 1:10 (1929), 32.

133 Russell and Russell, Ultra-violet
Radiation, p. 140. See also the photograph included in Gamgee,
Children, p. 11.

134 On the Sunlight League’s facilities at
Kenwood (1924), see Sunlight, 1:10 (1929), 3–5. In 1930, it also
created a sunbathing centre in Regent’s Park, treating 148 children, see
Sunlight, 2:7 (1932), 200.

138 John Stanislav Sadar, ‘“Vita” Glass and the
Discourse of Modern Culture’, in Grace Lees-Maffei (ed.), Writing
Design: Words and Objects (London and New
York: Berg, 2012), pp. 103–17, at p. 111. See also Sadar,
‘Unpacking’; Carter, Rise and Shine, p. 68; and Hobday, Light
Revolution, p. 121. On the London Zoo’s installation of lamps
and ‘Vita’ glass, animals, and children, see G. M. Vevers, ‘Fresh Air
and Sunlight at the Zoo’, Sunlight, 1:8 (1929), 21–3.

142 ‘The Sterilisation of Water by Ultra-violet
Rays’, Lancet, 5 February 1916, p. 310; ‘Military Hygiene and the
Efficiency of the Soldier’, BMJ, 27 March 1915, pp. 553–4; and
‘Medical Arrangement of the British Expeditionary Forces’, BMJ, 6
February 1915, pp. 264–5; and Russell and Russell, Ultra-violet
Radiation, p. 105.

151 Hill, ‘Discussion on Influence of Sunlight’,
p. 473; and Sunshine and Open Air, p. 93.

152 See ‘Let Children Live in Sunshine!’
Yorkshire Evening Post, 28 May 1926, p. 5.

153 Colour photography became available on the
market in the mid-1930s; see Hentschel, Mapping the Spectrum, p.
208; and Kelley Wilder, Photography and Science (London: Reaktion, 2009), pp. 69–71.

154 In White, Dyer argued that ‘shine’ is
aligned with sweat, dirt, and ‘non-white people’ (p. 78) and ‘glow’ with
‘idealised white women’ (p. 122). See also Connor, ‘Integuments’, p. 50.
In the figures throughout this chapter, figures display both ‘shine’ and
‘glow’, exemplifying the collapse of racial distinctions.

155 See Sarah Street, Colour Films in
Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of
the British Film Institute, 2012), p. 60; and Tom Gunning, ‘Colorful
Metaphors: The Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema’,
Living Pictures, 2:2 (2003), 4–13. Intriguingly, the
technical guidelines for using Technicolor, as designed by Natalie
Kalmus, were premised upon intense lighting conditions using arc lamps,
see Street, Colour Films in Britain, p. 54; and Dyer,
White, pp. 89–93.

156 See Sander Gilman, Making the Body
Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999); Carter, Rise and Shine, p. 110; Sheehan, Doctored,
pp. 93–5. As Batchelor noted, ‘If colour is cosmetic, it is added to the
surface of things, and probably at the last moment. It does not have a
place within things; it is an after-thought; it can be rubbed
off’. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2005), p.
52.

161 Ryan Johnson, ‘European Cloth and
“Tropical” Skin: Clothing Material and British Ideas of Health and
Hygiene in Tropical Climates’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 83:3 (2009), 530–60, at p. 559. See also Woodruff,
Effects of Tropical Light; and ‘Coloured Clothing for
Tropics’,The Times, 20 June 1922, p. 12.

164 See Miles, Burning Mirror, pp. 43–4,
68–9. Interestingly, in Troup’s third edition of Therapeutic Uses of
Infra-Red Rays (1936), he included an appendix on infrared
photography (pp. 142–7). He discussed an infrared photograph of a
‘negro’ that showed the subject’s skin as light but
concluded this only enabled easier reading of his racial origin: ‘The
photograph showed the racial characteristics far better than a normal
photograph. In this case a strain of Mongoloid descent was at once
perceived by ethnologists’ (pp. 146–7). The disconcerting reversal
occurred when viewing negatives too, Vogel writing, ‘The white face is
made black, and the black coat, light. No one would hang up on his wall
a picture representing him as a Moor.’ Hermann Vogel, The Chemistry
of Light and Photography (New York:
D. Appleton & Co., 1875), p. 46.

165 Ahmed, ‘Animated Borders’, p. 58. Müller
wrote, ‘It is a curious fact, that not all white men can obtain the
shining golden-brown colour. A few get a dirty dark-brown, some
others a yellowish colour, and some – in most cases the red-haired – get
only freckles’ (my italics, Sun-Bathing, p. 46).

168 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995),
especially her discussion of the ‘Chlorinol’ advertisement, pp. 220–1.
See also Rebecca Herzig, ‘Removing Roots: “North American Hiroshima
Maidens” and the X-Ray’, Technology and Culture, 40
(1999), 723–45; Amina Mire, ‘“Skin Trade”: Genealogy of Anti-Ageing
“Whiteness Therapy” in Colonial Medicine’, Medicine
Studies, 4:1–4 (2014), 119–29; Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the
Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. T. Dunlap
(New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), p. 148; Sheehan, Doctored, pp. 89–90; and Thomas de la
Peña on radium and X-ray experiments of c. 1903–4 to turn
‘Negroes’ white in Body Electric, pp. 171–2; and ‘Bleaching the
Ethiopian: Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-Ray
Experiments’, Technology and Culture, 47:1 (2006), 27–55.
Fascinatingly, one well-known radiologist believed to have taken part in
the experiments was Dr Henry Pancoast, the son of Dr Seth Pancoast, who
wrote about the merits of blue-light therapy (1877) as discussed by
Sheehan. Ultraviolet radiation has the ability to both produce colour
and remove it; it can pigment skin and bleach the pigment out of
fabrics. Hanovia’s user manual warned that the ‘Homesun’ would fade the
carpets like sunshine (A Short Book of Instructions for Users of the
‘Homesun’ Sunlamp, user manual, 1940, p. 5). This bleaching
effect is encapsulated in the French word, décoloration, a
phenomenon that intrigued and perplexed artists encountering the intense
Mediterranean sun and its ‘blanching’ of local colour. See Woloshyn,
‘Aesthetic and Therapeutic Imprints: Artists and Invalids on the
Côte d’Azur, c. 1890–1910’, Nineteenth-Century Art
Worldwide, 11:1 (2012).

169 Dunne Romano, ‘Dark Side of the Sun’, pp.
50–1. She noted this was in contrast to contemporaneous Australian fears
over the instability of ‘whiteness’, as discussed by Warwick Anderson,
The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny
in Australia (New York: Basic
Books, 2003). See also Dyer, White, pp. 49, 57; and Freund,
American Sunshine, p. 106.

170 For Woodruff, acclimatisation was ultimately
impossible (Effects of Tropical Light, pp. 271, 321). He
considered that each race, based on degrees of pigmentation, belonged to
particular environmental zones according to sunshine levels, and that
racial stock eventually deteriorated as a result (p. 216). See also
Sheehan, Doctored, pp. 90–4, 104; Carter, Rise and Shine,
pp. 13–16; and Johnson, ‘European Cloth and “Tropical” Skin’, p.
548.

186 Surén, already well known for his nudist
publications during the Weimar Republic, joined the Nazi Party in 1933
as a specialist in physical education in the Reich Labour Service. See
Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social
History, 1890–1930 (Chicago, Ill.:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 189; Overy, Light, Air and
Openness, p. 164; and Worpole, Here Comes the Sun, p.
44.

188 Analysing nineteenth-century American
photographic portraits of black subjects, Sheehan similarly concluded,
‘While light could rescue etiolated bodies from their pathological
state, moreover, it also had the potential to close the perceived gap
between the races, thus threatening to break down the crucial boundaries
that defined social difference. As a result, phototherapeutic and
photographic light had the power to darken and lighten, compose and
decompose, as well as physically and chemically alter the complexion of
a nation’ (Doctored, p. 104).

189 It was already clear that X rays could (and
were actively used to) sterilise the sexual organs, see Weart,
Nuclear Fear, pp. 47, 52. The Nazis planned to secretly
sterilise unsuspecting Jewish men and women at an estimated rate of
4,000 per day; see Kevles, Naked to the Bone, p. 123. Later, with
the advent of atomic energy, some British writers playfully speculated
on the possibility of ‘atomic birth control’ and ‘atomic hereditary
control’ by means of ‘controlled mutations’, presenting an interesting
reversal. See Christoph Laucht, ‘“Dawn – or Dusk?” Britain’s Picture
Post Confronts Nuclear Energy’, in Dick van Lente (ed.), The
Nuclear Age in Popular Media: A Transnational History, 1945–1965
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012),
pp. 117–48, at p. 135. Technologies designed to produce, inhibit, or
control reproduction have caused and continue to cause controversy, see
Michelle Stanworth (ed.), Reproductive Technologies: Gender,
Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge:
Polity, 1987), pp. 10–11.